What If Home Ends With the PS3?
by Orion_NGC1976, HSM Editor
As PlayStation users often do, we sit and contemplate, “What will be coming next? What new and exciting things will the PS4 bring to us?”
As with all new things, there is also house cleaning done to no longer support that which is outdated and unprofitable. We have already seen this with the PS3 game console; originally, it supported PS2 games and later dropped it in order to bring down the price of the console. We have seen this in Home, as well, with the recent retirement of public spaces.
This begs one to ask, “Will Home be ported to the PS4?” and “What does it mean, if it is not?”
Some may feel that Sony has an obligation to continue support of Home on the PS4. Many of those people feel that they have invested too much, with time and money, in Home for Sony to discontinue it.
Does this really justify making Sony obligated to continue Home on the new console platform? As much as I love Home and want it to continue to exist on any new platform Sony creates, I don’t feel they have any obligation to users to continue Home.
My life has been peppered with discontinued products. I once bought a pair of slacks with lifetime alterations. A short time after the purchase, they fell on hard times and were bought out by another clothier, but kept the same name. When I went in for an alteration, I was told they had no obligation to honor the old owner’s agreement.
I am a long time user of Apple products from the original Apple ][ days. When the Macintosh was released, it never supported the Apple ][ 6502 processor. Over the years on the Macintosh platform, Apple has dropped support for 68000 and PowerPC processors and OS 9, forcing users to repurchase software. And let’s not get started on the current trend with the iPhone.
I’ve repurchased music in its many variations of formats: records, tape, CD, and MP3. The same has occurred with video formats: Beta, VHS, DVD, and Blueray.
Both of these are obsolete.
Beta is a perfect example to illustrate my point. Sony had no obligation to keep producing Beta players in the US, just because people – like myself – had invested in their superior product. They could not compete with the popular, yet inferior, VHS format, so they left the American market, leaving many Beta users high and dry.
Like it or not, and for better or worse, this is way decisions are made. If Sony is not recouping their costs for Home, which includes costs for porting to the PS4, they are justified in making business judgments based off of their return on investment. There is no such thing as a company being obligated to continue a product that they deem as not producing enough return on their investment to warrant its continuation. I am not making a statement here about the profitability of Home, of which I have no information concerning, only relating how a business decision about Home might be made.
If – and I am only playing devil’s advocate – Sony decides not to port PS Home to the PS4, what does that mean to me? My family and I have spent a fair amount of money and time on Home. If it is discontinued, am I going to be mad at Sony, because I had spent a fair amount of money on Home? Simply put, the answer is no.
When I first came on Home, I was one of those people that thought, “What? You’re nuts to pay money for something that isn’t real.” After months of wearing drab, free clothes, I secretly envied some of the cool items and clothing that others had, which increased their enjoyment of their experience in Home. I thought about other ways consumers spent money for purely entertainment purposes. There are many forms of fleeting entertainment that people routinely spend hard-earned cash on, such as movie rentals, going to the theater, dining, live shows, amusement parks, etc. How is spending money in Home any different? We spend money to increase our entertainment value.
Thrill Rides
Using the rental of a movie as an example, one spends five or six dollars to be entertained for roughly two hours, and then they return they movie to the rental shop. You have nothing tangible for your expenditure. This is the way I have come to view Home. I am spending money to increase my entertainment value for a period of time. Spaces, clothing items, companions may come and go at any time. Home may even cease to exist. I won’t have any sour grapes; I have enjoyed the time I have spent in Home.
It is not about the money. It is about the social aspects of Home, and it is that I would miss if Home closed its doors. I have met people that I would not have met any other way. All the gamers I personally know own XBox game consoles. The only way I have played online with others is through people I have met on Home. It has been through this network of friends, whose judgments I have come to trust to make honest and good game recommendations, which you just cannot get from reading reviews online.
I believe that this was the real impetus behind creating Home: to get gamers together to discuss gaming, make recommendations and play together. If Home’s existence ends with the PS3, the real hit to Sony and developers of Sony products will be because meaningful communication between players of PlayStation games would cease.
August 2nd, 2012 by Orion_NGC1976 | 9 comments
Father, husband, dolphy racer and sometimes Home world traveler.
Without getting to deep in to the future I would say that..
PlayStation Home on PlayStation 4 would do fairly well IF they do a few things. Start fresh and new with Home on PS4. Completely new.
Take everything they have as far as ”Info gathered” and develope PS4 Home with third party developers in mind. Give them “4” times the power, memory and tools to develope the Home they must have been wanting for years now.
Sony needs to give up big as far as ”limits” go.
Space, estate and Club limits need to be much greater than they currently are.
Game launching has become a failure on Home because there are no companies stepping up and creating in-world designed spaces that can cater to gamers needs. Clan group spaces or specifically designed clubs that allow “Special” meet up’s before launching is only a dream on our current Home. Current third party Developers are limited by two things currently in Home. Pace is one of them. If you think about that awhile you’ll understand it.
The other thing is that they face a lot of limitations currently. They do know how to do great things now and I can see a whole new world open up for them if Home goes to PS4.
Read over my comment and I think it’s safe to say that much.
Nice article.
It’s Bluray. no e.
But about the point of the article. To me the Home experience isn’t akin to rental. When I “buy” something in Home I’m not renting it. It has never been presented as a “rental”. The PSN does allow rental, check out the movies and the full game previews PS+ members get. When a gamer buys Home products they are purchasing them. If one day my DLC for Infamous just stopped working I’d be pretty miffed about it.
This is, however, an issue we are going to have to face as this free-to-play concept takes off. Games running on servers do not have the tangibility or upkeep that games on physical media have. My copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga costs $0 to sit on the shelf. It has remained there untouched for years and if I ever get the desire to play it again… it will be there (as long as my Saturn still works!). A free to play game (that you may have spent real money on to purchase items in) does cost money to keep “on the shelf” just in case you’d like to play. At SOME point the Home community WILL move on to something else. I suspect it might be the developers who move on first. Hopefully it will be some new version of Home we can all “move” to but it may not even be a Sony product.
Remember when “Evercrack” was a term? Things change pretty swiftly in this digital world of ours.
Unfortunately Home was pretty unique when it came on the scene and I don’t think the growing pains are over.
Now I’m wondering about the “rental” concept as it could relate to Home. $5 to buy a place for ever… $2 to rent it for a week. Hmm… Clothes, companions… I wonder if it could work.
Gid you bring up some very interesting points. For me Home has always been about the social aspect and all else has facilitated that end.
I suppose with the friends I have met on Home -everything I have purchased -I have considered money well spent to that end. In other words, I could be sitting across from you right now paying for our coffees -10 dollars easy… Or we could go to a movie together -Like maybe 25 dollars, or maybe we just take a drive in the country and watch fireworks… how much in gas, time in travel, and will they even allow fireworks?
On the other hand I am in California and you are in? where? Somewhere else- which would make it impossible for us to have a conversation over coffee- or we never would have met because I would have never came in contact with you.
And you know, What if you are in Scotland… maybe someday I will save up enough fun money to jet over and get a hotel, a car rental, etc. just so I can sit with you for an hour before you go to work and tell you all the things I have been thinking about in the last day… hmmm wouldn’t that be nice…
All the money I have spent here seems so little compared to all the great people that I have met. Compared to all the different perspectives the fantastic conversations about creativity and art and writing etc.
And we have not even broached the subject of what it would be like if one of us were physically disabled.
Namaste.
Gid, the rental comparison was a psychological comparison and not a literal one. Many people spend money on fleeting forms of entertainment, such as movie rentals, but won’t buy things in Home. It is the perception that you aren’t buying anything real in Home. If they realized that with other forms of entertainment, you purchasing the experience and not anything tangible. Even though you are getting virtual items in Home, I still view it as a purchase towards raising my entertainment value in Home.
As far as retracting items: I don’t know the specifics of the agreement that is made with Sony, but we can use Kindle as and example. 1984 and Animal Farm were retracted and removed from people’s devices.
As with any service, and Home is a service, that service can be removed at anytime and with it all your in service purchases. In this sense, it can be veiwed as nothing than a long-term rental. As HIW said, I hope the rental period is a very long one.
Clearly you’ve thought about this a lot Orion, and made some good points. Sony have been known for their quick decisions in the past, in fact I think it’s safe to say that if it were not for their snap decision in the early 90’s we wouldn’t all be on this forum at all. I’m talking about Nintendo and Sony’s breif partnership concerning the SNES and its add-on; but that’s digressing…
There is every possibility that Sony could shut down the current version of Home, to make a new one for PS4 users, but look at the logic: what’s the size of that install base? In comparison to PS3 users, not even a drop in the ocean. So where’s the financial drive to create such a scenario?
I think it far more logical (and typical of Sony’s behavior) to continue the current Home program as is until it’s at the point of bring deserted. Making our current “purchases” transferrable would be the ultimate solution to all this, but your view on Home items as nothing more than spot-on Orion. If you go into your purchases section of your XMB menu, will you find a single thing from Home on that list? No, you won’t. Why not? Because they’re all in your services and rentals section. Speaks for itself really.
A lot of people don’t understand that little (insignificant?) BETA tag on the Home franchise, they missunderstand their “property” as their own. Fact is, that one little label means Sony van take it all away from you and you can’t say a damn thing about it. Fair? Probably not.
Home has opened a lot of eyes into future ways of business, and a cleaner, smoother way of personal digital socializing. More than Facebook could ever dream of! Not only that but despite Nintendos efforts with the Wii and the casual gamer, I think Sony have found a way to bring people who’d never concider a console into the demographic far more successfully.
Great read Orion, thanks.
KrazyFace thank you for your comments and I agree that virtual environments have opened a new frontier of “personal digital socializing.” Now if I could just get Home on my phone.
Every purchase I’ve made in Home has come with the understanding that it will be lost someday. Hopefully later rather than sooner.
If a new Home was released for the PS4, I’d look at my Home investment the same way I look at a bar tab at the end of the night: Worth the money for the experience, more often than not. And my bar tabs regularly eclipse my Home spending.
I think the best point in this article relates to format. I’ve bought movies on VHS, laserdisc, DVD and Blu-Ray. I’ve repurchased the same games on different consoles through the generations. If I really like the content, it’s worth it to me.
Ultimately, PS3 Home is the VCR; that is, it’s little more than a content delivery platform. If all of Home’s third-party developers started publishing the same content through a PC-only platform, or on a different console, at some point in the future, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’d follow them, and I think a great many Home users would as well.
This is just it HearIt! I do not want to lose my content, but I would follow. The important thing to me are the friendships… Also this place HSM offers an alternative form of contact for many of us. I feel a great sense of gratitude that is here for us (nod to those that spend their time running it). Not only is it the type of person that one might find writing here but it is also a forum/space outside of HOME. I would look to create the alt form of communication for all my friends and the people I admire such as yourself -if I knew that I would be losing HOME.
Good write Orion. It’s funny, I use the same logic of going to the movies to justify my expenses, in fact I think we are better off here over a movie. When you see a movie, and the credits roll, you are left with nothing at all, just the memory of what you hope was a good movie, here in Home when you buy any item, it’s yours and you can come back to it time and time again. I can’t say that I would be at all pleased to simply lose my monetary investment and the thought of what was, will be good but I’m not sure that it would ease the sting. Corporate policy being what it would/could be saying that possibly Home would just plain shut down, means we the users would not have a voice and we would have to just walk away as the doors shut.Good job Orion.