by IrishSiren, HSM guest contributor

So, what the hell, I decided to poke my head back into Home and take a look around.

Let’s discuss the good stuff first. The News Reader is an excellent new feature; it helps to disguise the ungodly long loading process during sign-in. I frankly prefer SCEE’s News Reader since it mixes community content with promotional media — and it doesn’t have those insipid Magnus videos shouting at me — but no matter how you slice it, it’s a welcome addition to the end-user experience.

The Home Challenges are a really fun innovation. I’m too disenfranchised with Home to get sucked back into a daily grind, but had these been around a few years ago, I might’ve stayed longer. Home needs to feel like an ever-changing world, with activities to fulfill; it’s about time this sort of thing was implemented.

And trophies? When the hell did that happen? You should’ve seen the look on my face when I signed in and trophies started popping up. I’m not a trophy hunter — honestly, those people seem a bit weird to me — but it’s one more step in making Home itself feel like a game, with tasks to achieve, that are somehow connected to the larger gaming world. This is a good thing.

So that’s three great features right there, and it’s fantastic to see.

Problem is…they’re overdue. They really needed to be in place five or six years ago, and it is the fault of whomever originally came up with Home’s design concept that such basic social features were missing. I can forgive trophies since Home was conceived during the PS2 days, but it took them this long to patch that in? Really?

Let’s go further. It’s great to see downloadable dances and two-player interactions — which, I gather from doing some homework, are relatively new to the marketplace. Again, fantastic to see them available. Likewise again, it’s overdue. Way overdue.

I apologize if I sound a bit more brusque than HSM normally permits. I guess I have a different perspective since I’m a whale who walked away from Home years ago, and spent the intervening time enjoying life beyond the walled garden. I’m really, honestly not trying to rain on anyone’s parade. There’s no doubt in my mind that the people responsible for maintaining Home and introducing new features have done the best they can with the resources available to make a compelling world out of the over-promised, semi-coherent pipe dream half-envisioned by Phil Harrison. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a hardcore Home user. And kudos to you for that! You’ve kept Home profitable far longer than I thought it could’ve endured.

But it’s that same profitability that I want to talk about.

One thing that’s become very clear after some study: sales. Lots of sales. Lots and lots of sales.

This isn’t isolated to any particular developer. This is clearly a trend.

It makes sense. You’d have to be a bit thick to notice that Home’s grand experiment in 2012 as a gaming platform fell flat. The proof of that is simple: Home had far fewer games released in 2013 than it did the year prior, and insofar as I can tell, there aren’t any games for Home 2014 released or announced. Games cost a lot of money to create and tie up your limited resources for an extended period of time, which can interrupt any sort of steady cashflow from new product releases. And a month after your game is released, it’s a ghost town. Since they’re third-party experiences, there’s no larger support infrastructure within Home to make your game results matter. And the platform just isn’t robust enough to offer games which can compete with their disc-based brethren, nor is it sufficiently convenient to offset the appeal of playing more casual stand-alone games on another platform (like my phone). So there’s no reason for a non-Home user to go into Home to play, and there’s no larger reward (beyond a leaderboard) to a Home user for playing a game within Home.

(The only exception I can see to this is LKWD Life, which is a loyalty program cleverly disguised as a game. Lockwood’s market penetration into Home is so extensive that they can pull something like that off, and it gives a Home user a sense of interconnectivity and daily activity.)

But that’s okay, actually. Home can be a viable, profitable platform by selling social enhancements — in short, by finally marketing itself to the people who already get it and use it. VEEMEE seems to be on quite a tear with this strategy (seriously, where the hell was Acorn Park a few years ago?). No, the larger concern I have is in regards to all the major sales events and deep discounts I’m seeing.

On one hand, this makes pragmatic business sense. Open with a high price, and then after the initial rush is done, run a sales event and get double the visibility. I’m all for that. On the other hand, though, this presents a bit of a conundrum: when you have a marketplace filled with reskinned virtual goods that are constantly going for deep discounts, and there’s no news about any large-scale new projects coming to the platform (or even if the platform itself will survive for much longer), this does cause me to wonder if this is placing deflationary pressure on Home’s economy.

At first glance, deflation sounds like a good thing. Who wants to pay more for a commodity if they can pay less? But deflation in a virtual economy can be just as dangerous as deflation in an actual economy. Whereas in the real world deflation is triggered by a drop in earning power, which in turn leads to less demand for goods and services, a virtual economy experiences deflationary pressure when its consume base experiences a drop in confidence.

And let’s be honest: there are good reasons to have a certain gnawing dread about Home right now. A PS2 concept that’s been around on the PS3 for seven years is bound to show its age. Despite all the cool new features that have come out relatively recently, it’s hard to ignore the following:

• The removal of Home announcements from the PlayStation Blog
• The egregiously long loading times (particularly for content validation during sign-in)
• The escalation of malicious user behavior, with surprisingly long response time that is only partially effective
• The apparent departures of several key developers from the Home platform
• The presence of viable (and newer) competitor products such as GTA Online and Final Fantasy XIV
• The absolute lack of any official word about Home’s future — not just cross-platform, but even how much time it might have left on the PS3.

So which comes first? Does all of this erode consumer confidence, which causes third-party developers to scale back their plans and run fire sales, or does the erosion of consumer confidence in fact prompt the very issues cited above to remain unresolved?

Replace “increased unemployment” with “increased consumer unease” and you have deflation for a virtual economy.

Ironic, isn’t it: when I left Home, everyone was complaining about price inflation. Now, it seems the attempt to appease that rancor is only further eroding consumer confidence. Which way do you want it, kids?

There is a way to break this perception of a deflationary spiral: Sony has to say something about Home’s future. The fact that they haven’t suggests to me that Home has relatively little time left — perhaps only until the end of their current fiscal year. By allowing a deflationary trend to continue, Home dies a slow, “natural” death, wherein everyone, developer and consumer alike, simply abandons the service in piecemeal fashion over time. This allows them to stave off any shutdown announcement until such an announcement has comparably minimal impact. There is no “good” way to euthanize a service — such an approach inevitably either hangs the consumer out to dry or sticks the developer with a last-call round of product deployments that no one will likely purchase — but there’s also no reason to preemptively rip the metaphorical band-aid off and artificially impact a revenue stream before it’s dried up on its own.

Realistically, Home has one chance at long-term survival: PlayStation Now integration. Even that, though, is a long shot — and Home would never regain even a tenth of the visitor numbers it presently has. Perhaps Sony has remained silent because they’re not sure yet if it can be integrated. This is, perhaps, the more optimistic outlook on the situation.

I know this sounds like I’m taking a dump on SCEA and SCEE. I’m not. Home is a business, and it’s hard to keep an MMO experience compelling for this many years at a stretch, even when you have a clearly defined (and compelling) design concept to start off with. I give Sony a lot of credit for keeping the doors open and the lights turned on long after I would’ve flipped the switch and moved onto something else. Home appears to be in exactly the position its numbers dictate for it: profitable enough to keep going, but insufficiently profitable to warrant further large-scale reinvestment beyond the recent feature deployments now enjoyed.

And so everything goes on sale. Caveat emptor.

Just remember: you’re spending discretionary income for fun, not “investing” in something. And if Home is still fun for you, as I wish it were for me, then go have fun in that crazy, one-of-a-kind virtual world if it still enthralls you. It’ll be a long time until we see something like it again.

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One Response to “Deflation”

1. Gary160974 says:

   May 8, 2014 at 5:30 pm

   About the best fan site article I’ve seen in ages. The problem is the features that have brought in, are good for home, bad for anything else on the PS3. Challenges well any game, MMO needs to have challenges. But home challenges involve queuing or avoiding queues and are mundane compared to what is found outside of home. The few trophies and no platinum trophy means I cam get better trophy return playing Hanna Montana game. The news viewer in the EU is good, you’re right about Magnus though. Get hear it wow doing them, his show was much better. But even the news viewer is no match for the apps and web sites dedicated to certain games now. It’s getting so far behind what’s available else where that prices need to competitive to draw users in, as the amount of new content being released is so poor unless you want more clothes of course.

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