SCEA Home’s Top Twenty Items (By Number of Units Sold) For July 15-21, 2013
by Terra_Cide, HSM Editor-in-Chief, with information provided by Paul Sullivan, SCEA Digital Platforms Senior Community Manager
After the dust settled from Home 2012, with all of the large-scale games having been released, and the reinvention of Home as a gaming platform more or less completed, one overwhelming question emerged:
Now what?
The answer, of course, is a retrenchment to what truly makes Home tick, which Home is free to emphasize now that the focus appears to be on monetizing the people who already use it: the social side of Home.
To that end, let’s take a look at the top sales leaders (by number of units sold) for the week of July 15th through July 21st:
- Lockwood Publishing — Beach Beauty Value Pack
- nDreams Ltd — nDreams Luxury Hot Tub
- VEEMEE LLP — Billabong – Broken Hearted Denim Shorts – Multi (Women)
- VEEMEE LLP — Billabong – Sammy Halter – Aquamarine – Bundle (Women)
- VEEMEE LLP — Wrangler – Dolly Tank Top – Female
- VEEMEE LLP — Personal Dining Experience – Table Bundle
- Lockwood Publishing — Beach Beauty Bikini – Black
- Sony Computer Entertainment America — Diamond Beach Mansion
- Codeglue — LMO – Balloons
- VEEMEE LLP — Personal Dining Experience – 2 Person Table
- Codeglue — Leggings – Jeans Model C (Female)
- VEEMEE LLP — Billabong – Balance Hoodie – Bright Kelly Heather (Men)
- Lockwood Publishing — The Betty – Black
- Atom Republic — K-pop Crazy bundle
- Codeglue — Leggings – Jeans Model D (Female)
- VEEMEE LLP — Wrangler – Corynn Bay Breeze – Female
- Lockwood Publishing — Beach Beauty Bikini – Red
- Madmunki Limited — Spunland Rabbit Hopper
- Madmunki Limited — Flusho Spunner Locomotive
- VEEMEE LLP — Wrangler – Long Sleeve Indigo Check Shirt – Male
So: what insights can we glean from this?
A.) VEEMEE clearly won the week.
With VEEMEE holding eight of the twenty slots, it’s pretty obvious that their aggregate sales volume probably took home the most gross revenue. But there are a couple of questions which emerge from this: from where did VEEMEE come up with all the resources to suddenly be so productive in Home (unless they were doing a lot of contract work for SCEE under the radar), and is all of this content, which is related to the social side of Home, producing greater net revenue than their game ventures last year? For as much as we feel No Man’s Land is a horribly under-appreciated game in Home, there’s overwhelming evidence that points to Home games being a high-cost, high-risk proposition that just don’t have sufficiently good odds of justifying themselves.
B.) Female clothing is back with a vengeance.
Half of the week’s list is chewed up with female clothing. Half. Which more or less answers the question of why there’s so much virtual clothing in Home, and why there will continue to be virtual clothing developed for Home: because it’s (comparatively) low cost and keeps on monetizing. Of particular note, I want to commend Lockwood for the Beach Beauty lineup: because the open secret about Home is that most of its users look far less appealing than their avatars, so by offering a swimsuit that caters to women who aren’t stick figures – while guised as something retro in order to give it a cool, “hip” touch – is just damn clever. Not only that, but collectively as individual sets and as a pack, they outsold the only other bikini on the list, which absolutely does cater to the anorexic-chic look, meaning that there is definitely a market for styles that don’t make avatars look like a size 0. So on behalf of all the women on Home who have hips, thighs and bustlines (such as myself), and who won’t fall through a flute without striking a note, I want to say thanks, Lockwood.
Speaking of Lockwood’s Beach Beauty Bikinis…
C.) Love it or hate it, x7 works.
No sir, I don’t like x7. I think it’s tacky and its aesthetics appeal to the lowest common denominator of knuckle-draggers. Nor do I particularly care for the way it was marketed to Home’s user base, which I believe was more responsible for the divisiveness it generated within the community than some silly digital velvet rope. However, as a business model it’s brilliant, as the people with “first!” mindsets play right into its psychology. The Beach Beauty Bikinis are proof of its success. Although they were actually available to the public on the July 24th release, those with x7 access could purchase them a week earlier, which explains their presence on this list. With the large turnover so far seen in these weekly lists (more on that later), it will be interesting to see if this strategy gives these Lockwood items staying power when we get the top twenty list for July 22-28, and if the items presently seeing early release via x7 will be on the list.
Seriously. Enough.
D.) Lowering prices does not increase unit sales.
Every single time someone on the Sony forum whines about developer “price gouging,” and how everyone could make more money if they lowered prices, I just want to pistol whip them. Because they have no bloody clue how Home’s economy works. Look at nDreams’ Luxury Hot Tub (which our own Cubehouse had a hand in creating) and SCEA’s Diamond Beach Estate, which both went for the jugular with pricing and undoubtedly made a lot of money. The Luxury Hot Tub is roughly the same cost as a basic personal estate, and since items in Home typically have at best a fortnight to put up decent sales numbers, nDreams decided to seize that spotlight for all it was worth. And the end result is that they likely made way, way more money than they would have if they’d priced it lower. Meanwhile, the Diamond Beach Estate, despite mixed critical reviews, appears to be off to a decent start for a high-priced estate; now the question is how much staying power it has. With new, additional scenes being released to support it, the extra visibility will likely help it perform well — further proving that exclusivity in a virtual society is something people are willing to pay extra for.
E.) Hi there, Madmunki.
Now explain Spunland to me. I don’t understand it. And I’m not willing to drop (the probably mandatory) LSD to figure it out, either.
F.) Weekly charts have a lot more turnover.
It appears nothing carried over from the previous week to this one, further reinforcing the knowledge that a Home product really has a very short shelf life in which to maximize the bulk of its sales, followed by a long tail of low-volume monetization. The PlayStation marketing engine is very critical to driving sales and visibility in Home and outside of it, and we do recommend any large product deployments which are coming up should be structured similarly to how Hellfire set up Home Tycoon, with some sort of recurrent event which can be used to generate extra visibility after the initial release. With so much content coming into Home so fast, and lingering question marks over just how much longer Home really has as a platform, the urgency to get content completed and published is perhaps the highest it’s ever been.
August 3rd, 2013 by Terra_Cide | 4 comments
Terra _Cide is the former Community Manager for Lockwood Publishing and Editor Emeritus for HomeStation Magazine.
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Y’know, I think the short shelf-life of Home products isn’t entirely down to Home’s user base being so flippant or having the attention span of a 4yr old on RedBull; I think the organisation of the stores is in part to blame for this flitting flocus from one product to another. If things were categorized properly such as having categories for KITCHEN, BATHROOM, GARDEN, BEDROOM, STUDY etc then stuff would be a LOT easier to find; rather than the massive trawl you have to go through when looking for particular items. Even a word search for products would help!
Instead, it’s the items in the lime-light that Joe Soap can find easily. But once that’s replaced with something else, rather than go sifting through random categories (and waiting for the sparse item info to load) they just turn their attention to the “next big thing”.
Thanks for these stats Terra, always makes for an interesting window into the Home user’s habits.
The SONY store is more disorganized than Fibber McGee’s closet.
Absolutely awesome to see Veemee fashion on the Top 20 list. Kudos on the article.
I must agree with KrazyFace on this. And it also explain, for my part, the success of x7.
With the “New and featured” being not so new I dont bother much to try to find every new trinkets.
The simple idea of having to search for a particular item make my head spin. So my shopping, for the little I do now. Can be resumed by looking at x7 weekly preview.