by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher

HomeStation begins the new year with an interesting challenge:

Now what?

I know that sounds a bit odd, but consider: everything we set out to achieve — everything – is now accomplished. This publication strove to be a literary journal for PlayStation Home. To be a platform for high-quality writing, artistry and machinima. To offer constructive feedback that would, in some oblique way, help shape the evolution of the platform and the content released thereupon.

We’ve done it. All of it. The HSM EOD Channel has hundreds of titles to view, allowing machinimists a chance to be aired inside Home itself. The viewership numbers for the HSM Channel are, appropriately, quite impressive. Further, thanks to SCEE’s Home Platform Group, HSM articles are now published inside Home via the News Reader — exposing every single user who signs in to HSM content. Everyone.

And, today, three HSM team members are employed by different Home development studios.

Now what?

As the parable goes, the greatest threat any warrior can face is the threat of total victory. As T. H. White wrote, once Galahad had achieved the grail, there was nothing left but to ask God for death. In the business world, we all know that growth equals life; if you stagnate, you die.

The answer lies in Home itself.

Home isn’t done yet. For all the fear over Home’s unknown future, the reality is that two major features were introduced into it during the tail-end of the year: the News Reader and Challenges. These two feature deployments alone make Home feel like a far more dynamic world, introducing some real sign-in-or-you-missed-it urgency. 2012 saw Home reinvent itself as a game platform, and 2013 witnessed a distinct retrenchment towards making Home more of a social MMO. At the same time, it does certainly feel that Home has possibly entered more of a maturation phase than a pure growth phase, which makes sense given its age as well as the age of the platform it sits atop of.

But there are several questions worth asking — and studying — this year:

Will Home’s active user base continue to monetize and support Home, given all the new attractions such as Grand Theft Auto Online, Final Fantasy XIV and the PS4? Is it enough for Home to simply exist, or will it need to somehow reinvent itself yet again in 2014? Will the 2013 holiday season, along with all the new PS3 consoles sold, introduce a significant influx of new users into the population? And with so many third-party developers working on non-Home IPs, how will this change the amount of content released into Home each week — particularly given the massive back catalogue of virtual goods already available? Indeed, how successful will these developers be in migrating their brand-loyal audiences to non-Home projects?

Home 2014 is going to be a very interesting year, we suspect. No matter what direction Home, its developers and its community take, HSM intends to be there, like Jan Rodricks chronicling the last days of Earth in Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

In years past, the story was about Home’s growth, Home’s evolution, Home’s reinvention; now, perhaps, it is about Home’s maturation — and how this community, having been given very nearly everything imaginable, chooses to engage itself and interact with one another.

We’ll also be branching out beyond Home as well — a trend begun in 2012 with HSM, and continuing to expand even now. The PlayStation gaming world is a huge place, in which Home is but one neighborhood. And if we move beyond the world of PlayStation itself, there’s a whole lot going on out there that didn’t even exist when Home was conceived of. All of this needs to be discussed.

Along the way, if you feel like contributing your thoughts to our audience — an audience which numbers in the hundreds of thousands — then by all means, we welcome your spec contribution. Now, more than ever, is an excellent time to make your voice heard. And today there can truly be no question that HomeStation is the place to do so. Home still has quite a bit of life in it, and it is worthy of study, discussion — and continued enjoyment.

2014. Let’s go.

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One Response to “Kicking Off 2014”

1. Burbie52 says:

   January 2, 2014 at 10:09 am

   Yes we do have a lot of things to discuss. Home is an incredibly rich environment, full of true life stories just waiting to be told. Nice read Norse, and I look forward to the next year and what it will bring.

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