by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher

I have a lot of respect for Joe Dale.

We’re both journalists who made the transition into the gaming industry. We both pull double-duty as production managers and social marketers. We both love to golf. And we both survived the (at times) mercurial tides of PlayStation Home.

What people may not remember is just how bloody hard it was, prior to nDreams hiring Joey, to get any community-facing feedback out of the lads in Farnborough. This isn’t a knock against them at all; they were simply busy being awesome, and didn’t have — at least to my knowledge — a dedicated point person to help facilitate social outreach.

From afar, I watched Joe step into that role, plus take on product management tasks at nDreams, and I have to say…Patrick hired a winner.

The Home community will never truly know just how much paperwork goes into Home production. Seriously. I’ve been the producer on full-blown PS3, Vita and Sony BDP apps for the MLB, NBA, NHL and others that had one tenth the paperwork of a single PlayStation Home virtual commodity. It’s a necessary evil: every virtual good needs its own commerce metadata, localization, pricing information, FQA check and more. There’s no way around it. But it adds up to a lot of paperwork time. Now try handling that while maintaining any semblance of regular and meaningful community outreach and marketing.

Joey pulled it off. Brilliantly.

In particular, it’s doubly impressive because nDreams is one of Home’s largest third-party production houses. Generally speaking, if you were to ask the average Home consumer who the top three Home developers are, I’d bet you a hundred dollars that a statistical majority of the responses would include nDreams on that list. They are the Lamborghini to Lockwood’s Ferrari: whereas Ferrari looks at the laws of physics and designs a car to be the best a car can possibly be, going right to the absolute edge of what a bunch of fuzzy-haired mathematicians says is theoretically possible, Lamborghini builds a car that takes those same laws and puts them through a funhouse mirror.

That’s nDreams.

So I’m writing this today because Joe Dale has left nDreams, and it’s only appropriate that we give him a proper salutation. nDreams itself will be just fine — their heavy investment into VR development now seems eerily prescient (wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a VR Xi?), they just added Mike Hayes to their board, and besides, they’ve got Jamie as one of their engineers, so you know that code is logical awesome — but I think it’s important to salute Joey himself for doing an outstanding job.

I’m sure his former colleagues at nDreams can provide far more interesting stories about Joe than I can. I simply want to share something that I saw which really impressed me: how he handled Xi Continuum.

The original Xi, an Alternate Reality Game, is still hailed by some as Home’s high-water mark. Hell, the biggest Home media site in the world, AlphaZone 4, takes its name and inspiration from Xi. And it was given to the community for free, with Sony footing the bill as part of a promotional effort for Home. So when it came time to deploy the sequel, and it was revealed that it would be a pay-to-play experience since Sony wasn’t paying for it this time around and nDreams had to recover the cost, you could clearly see the recipe for inevitable community invective as a response.

Some users cherish Xi because, to them, it symbolizes this false utopian ideal of Home being a completely free experience which offers amazing experiences to anyone and everyone without any thought of how to recover those costs. The reality is that Home is a business, and like any business, it must be profitable to survive. Xi Continuum crystallized that point, and the game frankly took a lot of unfair flak from elements of the community because of that sundered symbology in peoples’ heads rather than anything to do with the game itself.

Now try being the marketing point guy for nDreams during the midst of all this.

Joe Dale

It takes a particularly cool head to deal with such a firestorm. Joe did it. And he did it well. Because you have to emotionally invest yourself in the products you’re representing in order to market them with conviction, it can at times be a real challenge to not take personally, in this internet age of callous anonymity, some of the frankly unfair and unnecessarily harsh feedback that has no basis in reality. And heaven forbid you stand up to the loudmouthed sentiment from the muckrakers; this publication has been vilified by some for doing just that. But when you’re wearing the hat of the community-facing public face of your company, you have to guide and channel that feedback, like a matador performing a porta gayola, into something useful — whilst simultaneously keeping the engagement level high (and preferably positive).

It’s quite an intricate dance, and requires a very specific skill set. Most people don’t have it.

Joe does.

(It probably helps that he’s an inherently likable fella.)

As an aside, did you know that he volunteers at the Special Effect charity? And, as is typical of him, he’s not shouty about it at all. He just gets on with the business of being a class act.

So now he’s departed off to Swindon, pursuing an exciting marketing career. Best of luck to ya, mate; I don’t know if our professional paths will ever cross again, but it was a genuine pleasure interacting with you over the years. And if you ever find yourself in Los Angeles, you damn well better drop by Sony Pictures so we can hang out.

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