Selling Us What We Already Own
by Bonzo, HSM Editor
The Harbour Studio is free. Everyone gets it. It is as free as Home itself. It’s your default personal space. Yet it is a perfectly valid space to sell.
Harbour Studio is limited in scale, but not small. When you measure from entrance to balcony, it’s actually quite sizable. Top it off with an an amazing oceanside view, and the dynamic ability to change wallpapers, and it is frankly worth purchasing as much as some of the less-popular estates for sale. But we get it for free, and thus it has the negative stigma of being the “noob space”.
I love the space itself, and have learned from several friends that ever since portable EOD was introduced, they have been spending a lot more time there.
Could Harbour Studio be a money maker?
There are a couple of things I would love to see in the Harbour Studio which could now be added as an expansion or an active item which would implement them. For one, an expansion of the wallpaper options for this space. Wallpaper packs, perhaps sold in bundles, offering more decor variations. Solid colors, perhaps, or more interesting graphic design options.
The space itself is fixed to permanent daytime. An expansion to allow for a diurnal cycle would tremendously change the dynamics of this space. If users themselves had the chance to change the time of day, it would be an even more powerful feature. Imagine this space at night! I personally have wanted to see this studio in a nighttime setting, lights glowing in the harbor and speckling the distant hills.
These are the simplest improvements, and I’d gladly pay for the feature if it were available. But why stop there when so many more improvements could be made? Imagine seasonal changes. Now the beach setting has been equated to a warm, tepid environment like southern California or San Diego. These places don’t have dramatic weather shifts, but believe it or not occasionally they do have rain. I tried placing the deluge lamp in this space and it was really nice to see it rain in that environment, but the only problem is that the sky remained blue and it rained inside as well.
If precipitation were a bespoke part of the environment, and it rained randomly, it would add a whole new dynamic atmosphere to the place. But just because the setting looks warm doesn’t mean it has to be in the virtual space as well. Play with snow, play with wind, and seasonal changes. One of the first things which struck me about the place when I first tried Home is that the door sent you to Central Plaza. The building directly across the courtyard from the bowling alley was essentially suggested as being the building in which your Harbour Studio was situated. The first time they made it snow in Central Plaza, you could return to the Harbour Studio and it would be sunny and bright as usual. It killed the illusion for me, and while we don’t have the Central Plaza anymore just having the kind of dynamic environmental changes would really revitalize the environment a great deal.
One more major upgrade which would really change the space as we know it. What if, when you approached the door, you had the option to go to the Hub — where it takes you to now — or took you to the marina below.
What would be the benefit of that? Just having an expansion of the space to visit. How often have you been there and looked over the balcony and wanted to go down to the marina and walk on the docks? At one point long ago, before one of the number of patches which fixed some of the features which allowed glitching, some users were glitching their way out of the apartment and down to the marina. But what if it were an official feature of the space itself?
You may be asking yourself why Sony would do any of these things if it would detract from buying other personal spaces. Well, I don’t believe it would detract. You aren’t buying the Harbour Studio; you already own it. Minor upgrades would just be a way to monetize on an existing product in Home. Something everyone already has. If all the features could be integrated, then they could be sold as a bundle, roughly for about the price of a standard estate now — or sold feature by feature for an individual price.
Having options hasn’t really detracted anyone from buying a personal space. I personally haven’t met a single user who has purchased one space and then chose to stop at one space. Usually, anyone willing to shell out the few bucks to expand their virtual real estate will buy more than one. This wouldn’t really be about buying a new space, but improving or expanding on one you already own.
Could there be more to this space than meets the eye? There’s always room for improvements, I have personally found myself spending more and more time in the Harbour Studio, even when I’ve expanded my personal estates to more than a dozen other spaces. Each space has its own atmosphere and feel; they each have their own charm and their own purpose, and no two are really alike. Harbour Studio is unique, even will all the current options available, and it is free — but a few upgrades would breathe a little more life into that space, and I would gladly pay to see it expand.
November 2nd, 2012 by BONZO | 5 comments
BONZO is an editor and artist for HomeStation Magazine.
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Options mentioned in the article would be nice. In Central Plaza when people would ask me where I was from or where I lived, I would often tell them I had an apartment in the Plaza overlooking the harbour.
Good article and ideas.
Yeah, I’ve been saying for ages that more customisable wallpapers are needed, and this space in particular would make a great showcase out of them for sure. I’m not sure how the pricing structure on something like this would go though, maybe something like .99c for 6 or 7 designs?
I’m not personally too bothered about the expansion of the space but Home and its areas have lost a lot if their continuity thematically.
I’ve said before that the current selection of wallpapers and the light switch already made the Harbour Studio more customisable than most other spaces on the market. Of course, many of the recent, more elaborate spaces dilute this point somewhat.
Still, I love the ideas in the article. I would rather have the option to customise my current spaces than to buy more spaces than I need.
I AGREE,& WOULD LIKE THOSE CHANGES, BUT I WOULD LOVE TO SEE CLIMATE & SEASON CHANGE IN ALL THE PRIVATE & PUBLIC SPACES.
I love my Harbor and would welcome any improvements to it. Wallpapers and choices for other additions would be very cool. But in reality I would rather see Sony improve our avatars than spend resources on the Harbor. Give us new emotes and dances, now that would be a change I would welcome with open arms.