Top Ten SCEA PlayStation Home Items by Number of Units Sold for January 2013
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List courtesy of Alphazone4; commentary by Terra_Cide, HSM Editor-in-Chief
There is something glaringly obvious about this first top ten list of the year, and before we start with anything else, it must be mentioned first – Mass Media’s Green Ticket is not on this list.
As an item that dominated the top ten lists for over a year, this is quite significant, if not entirely surprising. It’s been almost a year since Midway 3 was released, and as we’ve repeatedly observed, if you bring a game into Home, the only way to keep it’s profile above the constant influx of new content is to continually update it.
The days of simply releasing a game onto Home with little additional content, assuming it will create a wildly successful following – as the original Xi and Sodium One enjoyed – are over. The fact that Xi: Continuum is completely absent from this list, while unfortunate, is testament to the evolution of how games are best monetized within Home. With the exception of the locomotions, the message on how to (currently) turn a profit in Home is clear – give the community a sound, regularly updated, socially engaging game with reasonable rewards and needs a constant flow of currency for a player to stay competitive, and they will keep returning.
No one has been as nearly as successful at doing this with their games as Digital Leisure. The fact that they occupy the top three spots with the 40,000, 500, and 15,000 chip packs is evidence enough. Nevermind the fact that since they arrived in Home, they’ve been consistently adding not only to their casino experience, but to their free hotel room as well. From floods to fires to murder scenes, one can only guess what they have planned next (questionable sounds coming through the wall from the next room?). As a result, they have a dedicated following of both old and new casino devotees, buying chips on a regular basis.
It’s easy to see that the whales of that particular section of Home are pulling down big numbers in chips; after all, the biggest selling pack of chips, 40,000 goes for a penny shy of a $20 PSN card. True, its cost-per-chip is the best value out of all the chip packs. If you’re one of the regular players and you go through chips on a fairly average basis, you can see the benefit this has. Yet the fact this particular pack is outselling – per unit – anything else indicates Digital Leisure is seeing a fair bit of revenue traffic coming their way, so the players aren’t the only ones benefiting.
Hellfire Games have also shown themselves masters at keeping their work within the forefront of the community’s mind with Novus Prime, and are proving to repeat this with Home Tycoon. They have also done what many just this past summer said was impossible to do – successfully sell a Home commodity for $50. Now granted, their 1,600 Home Tycoon Gold Coins does come with some rather nifty VIP items – provided you aren’t picky about the fact that everything in it is gold. You get a car (very handy in collecting suitcases) as well as a mayor’s suit. So you are getting more than just in-game currency with your initial spenditure.
And if you don’t think it’s possible to go through so many gold coins that this pack has that it needs to be purchased more than once, allow me to introduce you to my five-year-old, who has a mild obsession with this game – especially its driving and construction elements. Believe me when I say that no one obsesses quite like an autistic child.
As with the casino chips, again we see an item that, yes, is the most expensive one offered for that particular constantly evolving game, but it also has the best value – a concept that people practically had to be bludgeoned over the head with when VEEMEE first introduced it back when they offered all the armor and all the weapons one could get for No Man’s Land in a single bundle.
(Speaking as someone who is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, I’m not exactly opposed to beating the thick-headed, but that’s another topic.)
And then there’s those masters of the microtransaction, Lockwood.
If there was a killer app for Home, their Gift Machine would be it. No other developer has figured out how to replicate this clever system. Think about it for a second: in the Gift Machine, you can buy anything from ornaments to clothing to companions to personal spaces – all areas of the Home market that are thoroughly saturated – and because they have a token allotment assigned to them instead of a dollar amount, this makes buying them psychologically “more” okay. Not only that, but because you can gift these items to as many people you want, you can purchase – via tokens – these same items, repeatedly.
With the Gift Machine, Lockwood has made it possible that transactions aren’t strictly limited to one individual item purchased per account, like you would normally experience when buying for yourself. If I’m honest, I’m struggling to see how a developer can really make a profit (let alone break even) on an item sold in such a way unless it’s priced at a staggering percent. With a token system in place, an individual can buy multiples of the same item and give them to other accounts. This is a much easier way to make your product profitable, and it’s a shame more developers aren’t doing it.
Finally, we move onto the items that have become the newest must-haves: the locomotions.
What makes the three dance locomotions on this list potential stayers is the fact that Home is a place where graceless and uncoordinated people such as myself can dance elegantly. The 1.7 update made it possible for this desire to become a source of revenue. Now before anyone objects to the concept of making money, recall there was a time when people actually went on the forums and said that they would be willing to buy new dance moves if it were possible to do so. You can’t berate entrepreneuring minds to capitalize on opportunity like that.
And what of the rideable locomotions?
Why, out of all the bikes and beasts that have been released, is it that the Lockwood Black Mustang beat out all the rest? It can’t be that there are more people than I’d ever guess who are secretly harboring a desire to be Alec Ramsay, sitting astride the Black Stallion as he thunders down the beach of a desert island. Considering that it was released in the middle of the month, technically, it shouldn’t have been as successful as the numbers suggest. However, Lockwood’s rather clever marketing broke that rule. Whether it was deliberate or not, the attention they garnered for the Drey Horse prop nearly a year ago has bled into and culminated in the success of this particular locomotion.
What these locomotions have done, unfortunately, is relegate the last Big Thing, the companions, to the storage bin. Such is the manner of all hot must-haves. Every market needs its fads. And unless a developer can come up with a way to bring more Tamagotchi-like elements to the companions, I doubt we’ll be seeing them on this list again.
More dance moves have been a top request practically since the beginning of the open beta period. No doubt that they, like clothing, will be utilized as a way to avoid looking like a preset avatar, and provided the movements are rendered with quality motion, will also prove to be a mainstay amongst the user base. While there will very likely be new locomotions – specifically dance locomotions – appearing in the top ten lists in the coming months, it will be interesting to see if any of the current crop will stand the test of time, and have repeat appearances.
With Home’s next big evolution – its status as a now exclusively cloud-based entity – in place, it will be interesting to see just how more dynamic the experience it will provide, and what the developers will do with the platform’s new lease on life.
February 23rd, 2013 by Terra_Cide | 11 comments
Terra _Cide is the former Community Manager for Lockwood Publishing and Editor Emeritus for HomeStation Magazine.
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All I can say is wow about a $50 item being here.
I’ve never been much of a card player and games of chance don’t really appeal to me so I’ve never bought chips but I do understand about paying for a virtual experience and the enjoyment that it can bring.Still,the Casino kinda mystifies me,as does some of this list.Interesting read.
Gambling, any form of it, is an addiction. (gaming can be too
)
For the few minutes I spent at the casino it looked nice. I heard rewards are good and they seem to have a good PR guy. DL did a good job.
But I think even they didn’t the chip would still sell.
I bought the Tycoon big pack and gifted half of it. I dont care for the gold stuff but 45 workers per city is really nice! One big difference with the “other” $50.00 is I can’t go out and trash someone else city with it.
I love most of the new dance animation. Well done, original and worth the price most of the time. But an update on some basic default dance could be nice too. Doc love to walk and dance with a companion nearby
I believe it’s no coincidence that the 40,000 chip pack soared to the top of the list (its first appearance anywhere in the top ten, I believe) just after Digital Leisure added the High Rollers Lounge, which features insanely-high buy-ins, with the possibility of massive wins. Competition for the coveted Leaderboard Jackets has ramped up significantly. During the first season, you could hit the top ten Casino-wide leaders with only a few million credits in total win. Last night, just a few weeks into the third season, the front-runner had $72 million credits — remember, that’s just for the current season — and the other were hot on their trail. Since the laws of probability are pretty much inviolable I’m guessing these leaderboard toppers are buying massive amounts of chips. Remarkable marketing, Digital Leisure!
I got a look at some of Lockwood’s new motion-capture dance moves last night when a friend sent me a set via the Gift Machine. They are awesome — even though each pack only includes three dances, they make your avatar look like a real person. I expect to see this technology on the top ten list next month, as people see how amazing they are.
I think you nailed it on the Black Mustang — I know I chose this horse because it complements the Prop Black Stallion. I wonder if the equation could work in the opposite direction? If Lockwood were to produce “prop” versions of its locomotion horses, would they sell? It might be worth the experiment. That way you could display your favorite mounts in your personal spaces, as Burbie did with her horse-barn in the Midnight Glade. At the very least, a Prop Unicorn should be a huge seller, to display in fantasy-oriented personal spaces.
I’m surprised Konami’s Anime Animation Pack made it on the list while Hellfire’s IdolStyles didn’t. I’ve been seeing those anime hairstyles everywhere!
…
WOW… Hard to believe with all the furniture people buy for decorating and clothing we buy for fashion.
It would be very interesting to see what the next top 50 items would be down the list.
No doubt that would be very interesting. I’d like to see it as well.
As far as clothing and furniture goes, my theory is that because there is such a *massive* variety to choose from in both categories, that there is no individual item that can command the amount of sales needed to break into the top ten, like clothing and furniture items did in the past. Recall in the first year of Home’s open beta, the asymmetrical halter top -- it was everywhere. Everyone owned that top. Nowadays, unless you’re a Homeling, it’s a far greater challenge to find two avatars wearing the exact same thing in the same space.
@Terra_Cide. I never thought about that. If clothing (or spaces) were counted as total I wonder what their percentages would be. Who knows? As long as the customers and the bean counters are happy, that’s enough.
Stats are interesting as was the article.
While the numbers we collected in the survey we conducted last year would suggest that yes, clothing and furniture (even personal spaces) make up the bulk of an individual’s spending, the difference between them and Lockwood’s tokens, Digital Leisure’s chips and Hellfire’s gold coins is that they’re single serving consumables. You buy a shirt -- that’s it. Whereas you can buy a chip/token/coin pack, use it up, and go back and buy another. On the same account, no less.
It’s not exactly fair to compare the collected quantities of clothing and furniture though, firstly because it’s very much akin to what’s known in accounting as cooking the books -- which isn’t exactly ethical -- and secondly, because of the vast number of developers who make clothing and furniture items. One developer’s clothing lines may make up the bulk of those sales, but because they’re all grouped together, no one would be able to tell which developer’s goods are performing well and which ones aren’t.
And then you have to consider what each developer’s standard for a “good return” is on an item, which I’m almost positive varies. If it costs a developer 100 hours at $20/hour (because good computer programmers and designers aren’t cheap) to develop a particular item in Home, how many units of that item do they have to sell in order for them to obtain that level of “good return?”
Isn’t accounting fun?
On top of art and programming you have design and production. One developer I talked with said each item they sold cost him $1000 in paperwork preparation that he had to send to Sony.
There is also translation, sound, marketing videos and stills, and lots more.
People should feel lucky to get all the selection they do considering many items do not make their money back.
@terra_cide
Stats are fun. Accounting is not fun. If a baseball player gets 500 at bats in a year and bats .250 that’s 125 hits. If (s)he gets 25 more hits in those 500 ABs their average is .300 and that is probably worth a million dollars or more at the major league level. Wait! Accounting can be fun!
Oops!
@deuce_for2
Perhaps accounting is not fun. Unless the developer has eyes as good as Ted Williams, a calculator and a good dictionary and… lots more than 25 hits. I guess I figured that out.