Space Spartans is still in my Top 5 of all time. I know the games have been ported, but nothing beats those original controllers for playing them.

If Home was still the same in 2017, I doubt many of us would still be using it. Sooner or later, we want it to evolve into its next generation.

I don’t think Home will always be “active” but I think it will evolve. Someday Home may be VASTLY different from the Home we know now. I think THIS Home will be around at least until the PS3 is no longer supported by Sony (2016?). By then the next Home will be well on its way. If there is going to be a next Home.

It’s possible that users of Home2 will be able use the entirety of Home but Home users won’t be able to use Home2. This would be a good strategy to pull Home gamers to the new console. Eventually the old Home spaces would go dormant because people will be using the newer, prettier, more advanced spaces and the old Home spaces will be removed, just as they are doing now.

an enterprising person could probably design and market a purpose-built console that streams a virtual world to the TV and invite third party developers in to share in the fun.

That is such a crazy idea that it just might actually work, and be a massive success.

It could be that if you bought it in Home you may be able to use it in the next HOme iteration but you won’t be able to buy it in the stores. This sort of transfering has been seen MANY times in gaming history. .Hack did it very well. It can be done, just will it? Time will tell!

Closing Home is really no different, from a business standpoint, then moving to a new console generation. No one expected SNES cartridges to work with the N64. As gamers, we’re accustomed to throwing away our investments in consoles after a certain point in time and starting over. Home, ultimately, will be no different.

Certainly the question will be raised when the PS4 is announced. Is it possible to make it compatible with the current Home? Certainly; anything is possible with software. Would you want it to be is the better question to ask.

Expectations for next-gen consoles and software are always that they will surpass what’s possible in the current gen. So the smart thing to do is to have Home2 (or whatever they decide to call it) available as soon as the PS4 launches, and to keep the current Home alive as long as PS3 use remains strong. That will fracture the community for a while, unless they create some cross-platform lounges, which might be a nice transition, but ultimately we’d all wind up in the same place again in a couple of years.

The performance of Miiverse will be worth watching, as it may send a clear signal about the future of console-based virtual worlds. Phil Harrison’s presence at Microsoft as they develop the Nextbox’s capabilities probably isn’t coincidental. Sony started something with Home and has proven that there’s room for a different type of gaming platform that could, executed properly, become a selling point for a system. What that’s ultimately worth in dollars and cents determines whether or not it’s viable. If Miiverse is a success, then a platform-specific virtual community is now a competitve necessity. If Miiverse crashes and burns, Phil Harrison’s probably back on the street and Sony’s debating whether or not it’s worth continuing to develop Home.

And even if Home ends, that’s not necessarily the end of the line for social gaming. With a growing community of developers getting their heads around monetizing freemium business models, there’s an opportunity for a web-based or PC-based platform to arise, one that would have the added benefit of being free from the audience limitations imposed by hosting through a specific console.

Heck, with all this Kickstarter fuss over ORLY, OHYA or whatever the heck that pile of fail is called, an enterprising person could probably design and market a purpose-built console that streams a virtual world to the TV and invite third party developers in to share in the fun.

No gaming experience is ever permanent. No gaming experience has ever been permanent. We’re all conditioned to this. Ultimately, any money that we spend on games is lost, either because our PCs won’t support them anymore, the console stopped working, or Blinky ate Pac-Man and we’re out of quarters. Home is no different. People will scream when it happens, but they’ll move on to the next virtual world eventually.

If Sony shut down all the Home servers and proclaimed to everyone that to enjoy their Home experience, they’d have to forgo the 100’s (1000’s?) of dollars/pounds/euros etc they’d already spent and just start again, how many of them would simply settle for that? How many would be quite happy to not just start from scratch, but leave behind their investments and become a stripped-down n00b for a new machine?

Actually, those are rhetorical, I’ll tell you; very very few. It would be a monumental mistake for Sony to try something so rash. Also, each well established business would be back in their race boxes, waiting for the gun shot. I can’t imagine they’d be best pleased either. No, Home’s not going anywhere in light of the PS4, things will be transferred across, servers will cope and PS3s n’ 4s will mix. For a time.