Who?
by SealWyf, HSM Editor
There’s a real art and science to the media tease.
On one hand, you want to build up hype, get people excited about your new content in the pipeline. On the other hand, you can’t always announce an actual date — it might slip, and then there would be disappointment, possibly even legal repercussions. And sometimes the details haven’t yet been set in stone. The thing may still be going through Quality Assurance. And so you hint and waffle: Great things are coming soon. We wish that we could tell you what. And when. Trust us on this.
Back when I was working with mainframes, there was a standing joke that the only date IBM was legally able to announce was “Real Soon Now”. The phrase even ended up on tee-shirts. Today, we saw something very similar from LOOT. In their streaming live press conference, they made a lot of definite product announcements, complete with release dates, for some very cool content. (Think rideable camels, a zombie who drags your avatar around, enormous MIB vehicle locomotions, and a night-time Hollywood Hills House apartment with some extremely cool upgrades, such as swimming and radio that you can hear all over the space without loss of volume.) And then, right in the middle of all that, they dropped in a tidy little bomb of a trailer.
Watch it. It’s short. Make sure you have the sound on.
Yeah. That’s it. A sound, the Home logo, and the word “Soon”.
So what was that sound? A lot of you already know. For those of you who don’t, let me drop a not-so-subtle hint, in the form of a picture:
If you’re still saying “Huh?” you might as well stop reading now, because you won’t appreciate how insanely cool this is. It’s just “Doctor Who”, one of the hottest, most prized intellectual properties out there — every nerd’s favorite TV show, either right before or after “Star Trek”. That sound is the call of the TARDIS, and it’s as distinctive and evocative as the opening chords of the “Ode to Joy”.
And it’s coming to Home.
Well, something is coming to Home. Something Whovian. I’m guessing “TARDIS personal space”, but I’ve been wrong before. Still, it’s a reasonable assumption, don’t you think? More likely than a herd of rampaging Dalek companions. Although I wouldn’t mind getting those too, while they’re at it.
The other thing I want to point out is that this nice little awesome-bomb was dropped only two days after Sony revealed that Pottermore is coming to Home. Two huge, highly-visible, intensely valuable intellectual property coups in less than a week. And they’re coming at a time when we are all more than a little bit nervous about Home’s future longevity. When we’re not entirely sure that Sony loves us enough to keep us around, once the PS4 arrives.
I’m no business analyst. I don’t even play one on HSM. But I really don’t think that J. K. Rowling and BBC are likely to back a horse on its way to the knacker. They see a future in the Home platform. And I think we should too.
My only other fear is that they’re going to do it wrong. We’ve seen huge intellectual property related releases before, which never went anywhere. When’s the last time LucasArts updated their store content, or the Cantina public space? That could and should have been huge — and it just sort of drifted to a stop, out of gas. We were obviously not profitable enough for them.
But we could have been. I think Home developers have learned a lot since then about what it takes to keep Home users interested, engaged, and spending money. Between pay-for-play and freemium games, monetization has been honed to a science. We may remember the old Home days of “give us everything free” with deep nostalgia, but we also understand that they will never come again. And that is as it should be. If Home is to be a vital, vibrant, ever-growing community, it needs to have a source of revenue. And that source is us, and our PSN accounts.
In many ways, Home has never been more vital. The recent core updates have opened up whole new classes of items for savvy developers — small active items, locomotions, media players and recorders, personal weather systems, custom dances and gestures. It’s getting hard to keep up with the flood of new content — just knowing what it is, never mind actually buying it all. And now we are seeing some very cool new players investing in Home. Pottermore. “Doctor Who”. And I would be very surprised if these are the last surprises we get in that department.
Not that they’ll tell us about them ahead of time. Media teases are an art and a science. We just have to wait until the next time a developer drops us a hint — the hook of a sound or a blurry image, baited with that most frustrating of words, “Soon”.
And then, let the speculation begin.
March 21st, 2013 by SealWyf_ | 11 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
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Maybe with Lucas Arts changing hands to Disney, we can hope for a breath of life back in their Home contribution. I still enjoy the Cantina very much.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it may be a game-changer. What would be even more awesome is Disney content in Home, but I’m sure that’s nowhere in the pipeline.
Woooooot!
I’m hoping for a Tardis personal space too, maybe some costumes as well? Things like Doctor Who outfits of the latest doctor’s, Amy, Rory(and Roman Rory), River Song, Rose, Dalek, Cyberman….list of possibilities are endless. Even pets like K9, Adipose, etc… if you’re a fan you know what those are lol. If not there’s always google
I’m happy with anything they produce that’s Doctor Who related personally.
Don’t forget the scariest of them all, Weeping Angels. (Don’t Blink)
I was HOPING you would read this article. xDD Did you bust some flips Aku?
TARDIS would be cool if they did bigger on the inside. Would LOVE IT if they brought the Weeping Angels in as a game, a maze type thing with lights going on and off.
SOON
We need a tee-shirt…
It appears Sony are backing Home with some big names, Pottermore pc version is developed by Sony, Loots parent company is Sony, even if its indirectly Sony its good news.
I thought it sounded like the ID from the machine in Forbidden Planet which led me to believe that Robby the Robot would replace Stapler.
I’ve been wrong before.