PlayStation Home Is Uncool — and That’s Okay
“It reminds me of my original critique of Sony’s approach to Home during the series of articles at G4, where it seemed Sony’s desire to court everyone basically ignored those who already got it.”
–Patrick Klepek, “Meet the People Who Call Home…Home”
by NorseGamer, HSM publisher
“PlayStation Home is a place where the poor can be rich, the confined can escape, the lonely can socialize, the shunned can be adored, the infirm can be virile, and the old can be young…and all of it is powered by the imagination.”
This summary of Home appeared on the Sony forum, courtesy of user JulianMatisse. It is, perhaps, the best written explanation of Home’s mysterious appeal to a small but vocal minority of the PlayStation user base.
It is also Home’s chief source of its own damnation.
Home fights a hopeless battle against one of the hardest things to overcome: the perception that it is uncool. But where did this image come from?
In reality, it came from a flawed implementation. Conceptually, Home could have been the killer app of the last console generation: a central gathering place for PlayStation gamers which allowed them to inhabit the virtual PlayStation universe. There are, however, two flaws in its execution:
- In order for Home to be home, it needed to be the PS3 interface. Instead of a 2D XMB, PlayStation users should have been immersed in a 3D, avatar-based interface as soon as they booted up the console. The message then would be clear: from your Home, explore and game launch — and then come back Home to talk about it. Because this did not happen, Home became a competing time sink against the very gaming experiences it was designed to promote.
- As Richard Garriott correctly observed: Home is a social metaverse with no clearly defined purpose.
The second one is critical. Because Home wasn’t the centerpiece of the PS3 experience, it had no reason to exist. And thus an uphill battle to attract and keep big-name promotional tie-ins. So Home ultimately had only one thing to sell to us: ourselves.
And the reality is that that’s just uncool.
Games are escapist fun. So are movies. So are books and music. We enjoy these experiences because we want to feel like something greater than ourselves: engaged in adventure, steeped in mystery and suspense, possessive of skills and prowess that are beyond the realm of ordinary life. But Home ultimately has none of this. Home is that weird uncanny valley where you’re standing in a video game world waiting for something to happen, and that something never does. As a result, it’s a fascinating, one-of-a-kind social experiment: when you build a world that has no purpose and allow people to be whatever they want inside it, what sort of society emerges?
Invariably, the people who will find the most appeal in such a world are the damaged ones. Those who are, for whatever combination of mental, emotional or physical ailments, generally considered outcast in real life. Those who seek to not be compared against anyone else, as the real world cruelly compares us to each other every day, and for whom the lure — and thus the ability to monetize — comes from living a life free from the prejudices and restrictions the real world imposes.
It’s about control. Control over all the things that you had no control over at birth: your gender, race, IQ level, physical appearance and so forth. The lure of Home is not the gaming experience, because there isn’t one: the lure of Home is the desire to feel like you have a successful and fulfilling life.
–Which, of course, is tacit admission that you probably don’t.
And hence why Home is viewed by the gaming community at large as…well, uncool.
Closed.
It’s difficult to find the right hook that makes a social MMO a mass-appeal hit. Look at The Sims Online, for instance, which had jobs and an internal currency — and was likewise criticized for being a giant chat room filled with boring conversation, until it was finally shut down. Meanwhile, other virtual worlds such as Second Life, IMVU and Entropia continue to thrive, fueled in large part by user-generated content.
Unlike traditional video games, virtual worlds must be designed to be engrossing for years at a stretch. This is no easy feat to accomplish: leaving aside the significant amount of resources such an endeavor entails, a key question must be asked right up front: why will people want to be here, and what will get them to stay and keep spending enough money to justify further reinvestment?
The ideal, of course, is to have a service that’s so good that you can charge a subscription model to be a part of it. But even that carries risks, as The Old Republic and Star Trek Online have shown, with their changeovers to a free-to-play model. So there is no clear-cut answer, when even wildly popular IPs are not immune. In a very broad sense, the easiest answer is to create an ongoing experience that’s so engrossing that people are willing to return to it — an experience which can be enjoyed both with and without the company of others.
Easy to type, hard to execute.
Home’s high-water mark. But were you willing to pay for it?
This isn’t a criticism of Sony’s execution of Home, by the way. That needs to be made clear. Home as it’s deployed never really had a chance to live up to its original vision, and overhauling it into a world with jobs, internal currency and so forth would require a level of investment that’s hardly justifiable. The high-water mark of Home was Xi — it was the one time Home itself was turned into a game — but that was subsidized by Sony at no small cost. While there have been missteps — the Hub simply reskinned Home and did absolutely nothing to fundamentally alter the actual experience or introduce new methods of monetization — turning Home into a gaming platform and having third-party developers shoulder the burden of the development costs for such games was pretty much the only viable gamble left for trying to make Home “cool” to the gaming masses without breaking the bank.
It seems that only now, in what is arguably Home’s tail end as a program, is there a focus on trying to deepen Home’s social features and embrace it as a social MMO. Which, to be fair, is what it should have been from the beginning. Home has spent all of its time trying to appeal to people who didn’t like it that it more or less abandoned trying to pull more money out of those who do like it, and to hell with any social stigma of being a Home fan.
So we come back to the root question: what will it take to make Home cool enough to bring more consumers to it, and thus justify keeping the service alive beyond the PS3?
In reality, it’s hard to know if it’s too late or not.
Oh, I don’t mean that as an imminent death sentence. The only reason Sony would shut down Home right here and now is if it wasn’t pulling in enough revenue to offset the ongoing overhead costs in technology and personnel. There’s a tremendous amount of content being submitted for publication in Home right now. But content has never been the issue: core services (which have development costs associated with them) have been the issue, because it requires turning Home into something massively different than what was originally released. This sort of full-scale change is far in excess of a typical core update, and given that we’re more than half a decade into the Home experiment, it’s far too late to pull a Final Fantasy XIV reinvention.
So we are left Home as it is: an uncool service tucked away in one corner of the PlayStation pantheon — a vertical which has possibly already seen its best days, which may or may not serve a greater purpose to Sony any longer, which may or may not be fiscally lucrative but is simultaneously not worth euthanizing due to any negative press in the middle of a console launch year. A user base which has (if the official forum is any microcosm) in the words of Ginsberg, “Demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury.”
Home is uncool.
And that’s okay.
Laugh all you want, but today’s geeks are tomorrow’s entertainment moguls.
It’s okay because frankly it’s only the uncool experiments that are going to move this industry forward. And, simultaneously, it gives me that old geek thrill to be a part of something that the rest of the world has labeled as uncool. Because when you live in a world where Patton Oswalt can lament the death of true otaku due to geek culture going mainstream, it’s fun to once again be at the bleeding edge of something that hasn’t yet made that jump, but is so tantalizingly close. Inevitably, something will arise that takes the lessons learnt from Home and remakes it into a smash hit, in the same way that J. J. Abrams can reinvent a moribund Star Trek IP or people like Chris Avellone, Drew Karpyshyn and Genndy Tartakovsky can reinterpret Star Wars into something astonishingly new. But for those of us who are here now, enjoying Home as it presently exists, there’s that fun thrill of being a part of something that no one else quite gets. We as a community may bicker and fight and posture and jockey for position, but bring someone in from the outside who criticizes Home, and the lambasting is enough to be measured on the Richter scale. Because it’s our Home, broken though it may be, and we inhabit it because it’s important to us.
This publication has contended, from the beginning, that you have to be slightly damaged in some way to truly get the appeal of Home. From a marketing standpoint, that’s not where the money is; if you’re the platform provider, you want your product viewed as the greatest must-have experience ever, not a halfway house for broken souls. The very thing that this publication celebrates and upholds — the human stories of Home, of how it affects us as people — is the same thing that gives Home its uncool street rep.
So what. Let’s be uncool.
Because here’s the thing: for everyone who’s shouted at Sony about their seeming lack of support for Home, can we please take a moment and congratulate them for having the stones to:
A.) Take the risk on it to begin with, and
B.) Continue to support it in the face of criticism like this when they could have saved themselves a lot of resources and headache by simply killing it instead.
There are plenty of questions about Home’s future right now. And there are only two possible outcomes: either Home survives past the PS3, or it dies at some point during the remainder of the PS3’s lifespan. And either Home’s fate has already been determined or it hasn’t. If it has, then we might as well enjoy ourselves. If it hasn’t, then we still might as well enjoy ourselves. Because the better the metrics look, the better the odds of long-term survival if the decision is still up in the air.
(It is frankly astonishing what Sony has done over the years to keep Home vital and relevant, despite the tepid reaction it received during its initial launch. I applaud the work that they’ve put into it. Frankly, had Home launched its open beta with everything it currently boasts, I think the reaction might’ve been a bit different. And the best part is that there’s still more stuff planned for Home.)
Somewhere, I have in storage stacks of old games and gaming devices that I don’t play any more. A ridiculous amount of time and money went into that entertainment, which I’ll likely never touch again. I don’t resent a single penny or a single minute spent. And Home is the same way for me: when it goes, it goes — leaving behind a stack of receipts and a hell of a lot of fun memories. No resentment. No bitter words. Just the hope of seeing something even cooler that’ll replace it, which I can dive into with equal zeal.
But that’s later.
For now, let’s be uncool in PlayStation Home. Why the hell not?
June 24th, 2013 by NorseGamer | 7 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
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Bravo Norse. You got it right this time. I wish people would stop living in the future and stay in the present. Worrying about what might happen does nothing. Enjoying what is here while it is here is the important thing. None of us is guaranteed tomorrow, you could walk across a street and get hit by a bus, so stop whining and have fun and please don’t stop spending time and money because if you do you will speed the demise of the very thing you love and are so worried about, Home.
Great read Norse and spot on, I for one will continue to support HOME. Been in HOME since 2009 and spent plenty with no regrets. Spending has enriched my experiences in HOME. Got to decorate private spaces, wearing cool clothes. I am dancing, swimming, flying ,riding etc. But besides all that most important is that I have made real life friendships. I have a friend coming my way on his journey through America and stopping by to say hello. Can’t put a price on that. So please enjoy HOME as you always have that’s why you came in here in the first place. If HOME stays or goes I will have lost nothing.
I came to Home by accident, more or less, and never turned back. I forget that the PS3 even plays amazing games. I have spent wad upon wad of money and with zero regrets. I love Home and all that I have experienced here. I have made great friends and will soon be flying to meet a woman I met here as we have formed a relationship here on this fine frontier.I have been so many things here. A martian miner, a robot, an orc, a vampire (and bat), and a woman. I have dug for fossils, collected orbs, and actually had luck in a casino. Home is limitless and I choose to embrace it for what and all it is. I will do like Burbie and Jellia, and I will enjoy it whether it ends when ps3 is gone or if it carries over to the PS4 (Sony…PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE). I will enjoy it day to day and be happy that I had such a chance to meet the finest people I could of ever of hoped to. Home is here and now and it is fun and even if people think it is uncool, so what big deal, we can’t spend our lives looking over our shoulders at what others think. I like to look forward and see what is. Anyways, someone will always think something is uncool and be critical. I say that since I’m not harming anyone and having fun as well as spending, I’m good and if it’s uncool, then I guess I am uncool but having fun.
Everything is uncool to someone. Don’t sweat it. Pffft! Eh?
As I child I build houses from up to 3 card decks and come crashing down they did. I rebuilt them, sometimes bigger. Family members were amused and entertained as was I. With no TV sometimes it was their entertainment and my fun for the evening or a rainy day.
Home is like a house of cards and sometimes it comes crashing down. As a child I eventually gave up on my house of cards and went on to something else, not that I remember what. Maybe a checker game.
If Home‘s house of cards falls and is gone for ever then I’ll go on to something else.
I still remember the fun of my house of cards with pleasure. And so too will it be with Home… if indeed it does fall like my house of cards. I will remember the fun.
Hello.
With its network errors, maintenance issues, long load times, constant bugs and mediocre tedious task based games. It takes the best of every social networking site out there and combines it. All these uncool issues are found in every social site out there, but all of them are in home making it the uncool of the uncool generation.
“Home has spent all of its time trying to appeal to people who didn’t like it that it more or less abandoned trying to pull more money out of those who do like it…”
After a two-year absence, it’s really interesting to find articles by both you and Terra where you now state as gospel what at one time those of us on the outside were shouting until we made ourselves hoarse: that it was the height of arrogance and stupidity for SCEA to ignore and insult its established userbase to chase after new customers. I mean really, how hard is it to understand that “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?”
After a two-year absence, that’s all you have to say and specifically point out? I’m disappointed.
In the world of business -- especially one as tumultuous as gaming -- there is no room for, “Well, if they’d just do it my way” or “I told you so!” thinking. Besides, these debates -- where Home is concerned -- have been done to death, and the outcomes are always the same.
In the beginning, what social-centric enhancements Home had were considered “boring”, “there was nothing to do” and users wanted more game content. The idea of playing a game that had no objectives, no rules, was (and still is) a foreign concept to many gamers.
Remember: it wasn’t until the game-based elements were introduced to the nascent Home community that it began to coalesce. Xi, Sodium One, to name a few.
When more game content came, people lamented that it wasn’t good enough. They compared it to $60 disc games (which is in and of itself a dubious place to base one’s argument), and expected the developers of such content to give away the house, since that was what they were conditioned to expect from Sony’s (at that time) track history with Home.
Now the back end of Home has caught up to the consumer demand of deeper social elements. And these things cost money -- real money -- to create and create well. So now users balk because social experience items cost in the $3-$5 (or more) range, not the $.99-$1.49 they’ve grown accustomed to.
The pattern ought to be clear by now. Would things be different had the plan for Home from day one been to make Home itself a game (where the scope of your access relied upon the accomplishments of the user), as opposed to making it a platform for games? It’s hard to say, but if human behavior is any indicator (in that even if you give a person everything they could possibly desire, they still wouldn’t be satisfied), I’d say yes.
That said, if all these old arguments are all people stick to doing, it would be no different than arguing with family over the inheritance instead of spending what remaining time left with the person dying. And that’s a damn waste.