by Terra_Cide, HSM Editor-in-Chief

It’s been nearly a decade ago, but I can remember a dinner conversation friends of mine were having on the topic of multiple streams of income. The main speaker, a lifelong entrepreneur who had recently made the jump from being someone who runs a business to someone who advises others on their business strategies, had this to say:

“Look, there is legitimate merit to the phrase, ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ If you have a half dozen eggs in one basket and it gets crushed, then you’ve lost everything. If you have a half dozen eggs in a half dozen baskets and one gets crushed, you still have five eggs to use. The same logic applies to entrepreneurship and income.”

This same logic applies to Home’s third party developers.

As of this writing, Home is now five years old. There’s a general consensus that it’s reached its peak. The PS4 is on the horizon, and with its release, Home’s future, whether it stays on the PS3 for as long as Sony keeps the console running, or if it gets ported over to the PS4 via Gaikai, is not a sure thing (I could go off on a tangent here about how nothing except for death and taxes are sure things, but I digress). If I were a developer who’s entire operations – or near as makes no difference – were contingent upon the income I made from Home, Sony’s silence and apparent disregard would be quite worrisome to me.

And once I got past those initial worries, I’d start planning on how to make my own opportunities.

In an effort to calm ourselves, let’s look at what we do know, and learn how to interpret it.

The fact that Home’s future is at present only known to Sony is not the first time Home’s third party developers had to face such uncertainty. When the entire PlayStation Network was shut down for over a month back in 2011, all everyone talked about was how much this was hurting Sony. Not a single person mentioned their third party developers, and they were the ones who likely felt it the worst. That said, if anything positive came out of the outage, it was the realization on the part of these developers that, like in the conversation above states, they can’t put their eggs all in one basket. In the rush to predict Home’s future, this basic point has seems to have been forgotten.

Thus far, three of Home’s more prominent developers – LOOT, Heavy Water, and now Lockwood – have announced their respective forays into the larger gaming world. The scope of each developer’s project indicates that they weren’t something just conceived over a lunch break six months ago. They’re ambitious, taking advantage of both what’s been learned in Home, and the trends that are taking place in the gaming world at-large.

None of it is – or should be interpreted as – any indication that Home will be ending any time soon, and to arrive at such a conclusion is foolishness. These developers aren’t starting their own projects because Home is going to end, but because diversification of income streams is the smart thing to do.

Furthermore, if Sony were to call an end to all production as soon as the PS4 was put on sale in November, this would have happened by now, as it takes roughly six months for major items to go from production to being on sale in Home. As Sony is a publicly traded company, this would be public knowledge by now. None of this has happened yet.

Now imagine for a moment that Home is a town, with Sony as its governing body, collecting taxes, policing, and such, and the third party developers are its main street merchants, selling their wares. The money that we spend upon their items doesn’t go to a bunch of big, multinational corporations. They go to help someone put food on their table. They help parents get swimming lessons for their children. When a company that employs a handful of people seeks to expand their horizons, and tries their hand at a new endeavor, it does not mean that they are abandoning their original endeavors. It is no less than setting up another shop in another town.

So is there any need to worry about these developers’ projects beyond Home as indicators of Home’s demise, or that they are somehow rivals to Home? Not at all. If anything, we need to embrace uncertainty, remind ourselves that this is just a logical evolutionary step for these developers – our local merchants – and support them in their endeavors.

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3 Responses to “The Importance of Diversification”

1. dpmb says:

   May 21, 2013 at 9:36 pm

   when I first heard that Lockwood (the best of the Home third party providers in my opinion) was doing I was excited. I have bought and, thanks to their gift machine, given many Lockwood items. I am truly a fan of their products. I did not think about the possible demise of PS Home. I just thought now I’ll be able to carry quality products of a company I trust with me. I urge other fans of Lockwood, Heavy Water and Loot to do the same. if you enjoy their products, support them in their efforts to serve us better and in more venues.

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2. Gary160974 says:

   May 22, 2013 at 6:23 am

   A lot of the developers get created from other companies anyway, take loot as an example it’s part of Sony and sells Sony entertainment product in home, it then goes off to do other stuff. Lockwood formed by outso. N Dreams were commissioned by Sony to do first XI so if anyone thinks these developers just appeared with home and just for home are very much mistaken.

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