Home Farm/Moon
by Keara22HI, HSM team writer
When my rowdy pals showed up to film Beverly HomeBillies (using the Hollywood Hills estate), we were amazed at the wealth of farm animals, farm themed items and furniture, and other usable props in Home. We even found an outhouse! It reminded me of the first big Facebook game I played: FarmVille. And it also brought back memories of a very popular game: Harvest Moon. I started dropping these into conversations in Home and discovered a huge wellspring of nostalgia for those games. Then we would inevitably drift into discussing the fun in the cooking activities incorporated into so many games.
So, the obvious question is, with the proven popularity of farming games, why are there none in Home? Do developers have the mistaken belief that farming games are too “girly” for Home? Or that a game that doesn’t involve killing something will never work? Are they not aware of the huge amounts of revenue generated by those games?
Here’s some consulting advice for you (and you don’t even have to pay my usual five-figure fee): create a personal space that looks like a farmhouse! And build in a mini-game that involves growing and harvesting things. Here’s a winning formula: The farmhouse should have a “country style” kitchen area (Lockwood, are you reading this?), a living room, and a bedroom at the very least. Burn in a bathroom with basic tub, shower, sink, and toilet. Wallpaper the walls and put in curtains for the windows.
China farm game
The exterior: exit through the back door to a back porch. Fence railings prevent going into the front yard but the scenery beyond the fence should be rolling hills of pastureland with horses, sheep, and cows. The back porch needs room for a porch swing or two, a table large enough for lemonade and cookies, and an optional game table (dominos?) with chairs.
The entire space, house, yard, and kitchen garden, should be about 60 metres square — like the nDreams BluePrint:Home. It should terminate at the far end with a river running through it and some shade trees. This is the perfect opportunity for a fishing game option. Frankly, I would see the initial personal space sale as a loss-leader, like a $99 printing/copying machine that uses $29.95 ink cartridges. Offering optional mini-games to add to a personal space broadens the market base considerably.
The one built-in game could be a blatant rip-off of Farmville. Heaven knows, there are plenty of those on the internet now. The formula is simple: select and buy seeds, plant crops, tend crops, go to market and sell crops. Lace this with special events and challenges: “You need to make 25 apple pies for the school bake sale” and “The price of soybeans is going up. If you plant now, you might see a profit on them at the market.”
Then there are the really wild and wooly optional activities to consider: tending your horses (currying, feeding, saddle training), feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs, and milking the goats and/or cows to make cheese. And the social aspects that made Harvest Moon so popular: marrying someone (an NPC) from the village and starting a family.
Farm games are a subset of a genre one might call “accumulation games”. These have been around for some time, and they seem to be especially popular in Japan. Some of the earliest accumulation games for the English-speaking market were ported Japanese games — games like Monster Rancher, Animal Crossing, and the ever-popular (and much-sequeled) Harvest Moon. These games hook into the need to accumulate and collect, to get one of everything, to experiment, to decorate, and to build your own little world from the materials provided. They may have been designed to appeal to young Japanese girls, but a great many people, including responsible adults, got hooked on them.
Once the Internet introduced the tools for micro-transaction commerce, this kind of game became a gold mine. And, in case you have been sleeping under a rock for the past five years, let me point out that Home is also heavily invested in the micro-transaction economy. The match between Home’s monetization culture and these games is so obvious, so stunningly obvious, that the real mystery is why Home is not already full of Farmvilles.
Could it be something as silly as our perceived demographics? Because Home is (supposedly) populated by adolescent boys, whose idea of a good time is running around shooting people. While farming games are (again, supposedly) played by women.
However, let me point out Home’s biggest spenders: the women. And who gets all dewy-eyed over decorating personal spaces? Uh huh. Plus, how many weeks (and even months) do people put into these Internet games? Not to mention all the merchandising opportunities with clothing, decor items, seeds, animals, trees, etc. I see this as an untapped goldmine that someone, eventually, is going to do right.
Read the reports on the Internet: Zynga’s Farmville hit the one million player mark in the first nine weeks! I had many friends and relatives who went bugnuts over that game. And they poured money into every nook and cranny that Zynga could entice them into.
And look at what Granzella is doing right now with the fossil digging. Buying that personal space is de rigeur, and next comes buying every upgrade in equipment, display trays, and (sooner or later) more upgrades. This will continue to unfold gradually to keep this goose laying micro-transactional golden eggs.
By the way, to get the pictures used in this article, I used Google Images. Search term: “farm games”. Results: more than one billion images. That’s billion, with a B. There are even farm games in Chinese! Assuming that just because there are so many farm games out there, it would be a waste of time to develop one for Home is ridiculous. You cash in on an existing market, like planting those soybeans when the price increases.
Ask your friends in Home how many of them are really tired of shooter games now. Ask them how many of them would be willing to spend some money on their own Home farm. This is a gold mine waiting for someone to develop it.
August 18th, 2012 by keara22hi | 13 comments
Keara is also known in Home as DarthGranny. She is a wicked little old lady with a wild sense of humor.
This article has so many great ideas, imo. Dominos? Yes! Farming/ranching? Oh, yes! Decorating a farmhouse? Yes, PLEASE! Here’s the perfect place for that bacon companion that’s coming out soon, too.
Love this idea and you are right on the mark with this Granny. I would love to see something like this come out in Home. It would be fun to also be able to grow a flower garden as a mini game in even a regular little “homey” cottage set in a beautiful countryside setting. You could have a variety of seeds to choose from like your farm game and where you plant them could result in a huge disparity in the gardens that result.
There are a lot of people who come into Home that live in an apartment or a big city environment like I do that would love this sort of thing because they haven’t got the ability to grow things in real life. It is like you said, a huge untapped market.
It is human nature to want to produce and nurture things, even males have this need though they might not admit it so readily. Great article.
You know when I saw the mui mui farm was the next item to unlock on the island, I got excited because I hadn’t seen it before and I didn’t know what it looked like. I was a bit disappointed when i saw how small it was. But it was still kinda cool to have something to go back to and check. The mui mui island remains one of my favorite spaces because of the interaction with inhabitants. The fact that you can unlock upgrades to the island, and the population can grow. But there seems to be a template there already. Very small scale but there are elements there that could be expanded upon into something bigger.
I was pretty excited about the MuiMui farm, too. Then I saw it and I was laughing so hard I thought I would cry. I want a “real” farm or flower plot so much.
Good point and nicely written.
I agree the “home spender” demographic is right on target for that type of game.
I’m not a farm game fan myself. But I would play that rather than another shooter. After Bootleger and NML it look like someone is trying to lure the AAA gamer into home. It’s not a bad idea by itself but i’m not sure they are the best target.
Again Burbie, I would love to have a small garden to grow… This could be a great add on mini game to a new private place.
Another sweet feature would be a friends list of up to like 10 people that you could allow to visit your farm and harvest for you. Social harvesting was a major draw of the social feature of farmville games, I like that Home Tycoon is set to allow friends to visit your city, that was also a cool feature of Animal crossing.
Interesting ideas.
I want to built a farm of some sort on the Blueprint space but with no grass? Perhaps I could build a sci-fi future farm with one of the add-ons. We shall see.
Too much concrete on Blueprint and not enough grass.
BONZO suggests inviting friends to harvest.
Perhaps a club instead?
What what would the owner pay.
I really wish more items would have “interactive” capabilities. A Farm minigame would totally work with Home. Well done article. would love to see more like this.
Avalon Keep has more than one area where a garden could be planted. I wonder whether that’s one of the additions that are hinted at …. mmm … Tropical Escape, Bonk, and what about hydroponic gardens for some of the spaces? Heaven knows, there’s more than enough room in several of the newer places. Perhaps have “climate” or technological limitations for different spaces and let people do a system like DCUO’s sales system using in game currency.
It’s been a busy day since this came out. Comments in here and even more comments from friends in person. Looks like this is the proverbial ‘idea whose time has come’. But, before we have a dozen different developers heading to the drawing board to put one of these together, one of you developer chaps needs to publicly put “dibs” on this and then run with it. (To heck with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.) The first one on the market with a good playable farm/game space is going to make some serious money. But a half dozen of them within a few months of each other would glut the market.
Gin wanted to quickly show me what it look like (farmville) yesterday. She spent 2 hours on it! Yep, definitively a must have on home. lol
I’ve been wondering the same thing myself for a while now. I suppose in a way we have similar things, I mean, micro-transactions are what they are, right! But I think there’s something that’s inherently “more-ish” about growing and cultivating something for most people. For me, it’s a case of amusement Vs time; if it takes too long to make things happen, I just get bored and go somewhere else.
Saying that, I’m STILL collecting orbs! But then, it’s a pretty tasty carrot that nDreams are dangling there. And that’s the thing for me, it needs an end-goal, a final thing, a grand prize. If that’s good enough, I’ll still go back and play the game now and then too. Like Animal Crossing, I think I spent a whole YEAR playing that game until I got bored of it, but one of the things that had me coming back often was the events within it tied to the real-world-clock. If Home devs can get something like this down and properly implemented into Home, they’ll never need to make virtual furniture again!
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I was so addicted to Farmville on Facebook before I came to Home. I had one of the top farms and over 100 neighbors.
When I seen the advertisment for Avalon on Home, I immediately thought of “Ravenville” on Facebook. Then I seen the advertisment for Tycoon City and immediately thought of “Cityville” on Facebook. Then I thought, “Wow, is Home getting some ideas from Facebook? What a great idea for Home!”
Now that I have been on Home, I can’t stand Facebook and no longer have an account with them. I know everyone wants to make a profit but Facebook Games are really….(how can I put this?)…. money hungry.
It is so much better to play these types of games in PlayStation Home with really friends and socialization.
I am excited about what Home has coming out for us in the future. See ya Facebook… Goodbye.