by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher

Hello all,

Following last Friday’s official announcement regarding Home’s closure, the rush is on for everyone — including HomeStation — to figure out where to go next.

If Home was high school, and this the final moments of senior year, then now begins the hustle and bustle of announcing which colleges everyone will be heading off to. Lockwood’s Avakin is already underway. nDreams is investing heavily in VR. Hellfire, VEEMEE and Madmunki all have teased various Home-like projects which they’re developing. Juggernaut’s launching into the indie scene with StarCrawlers, while Heavy Water is betting heavily on Axis Game Factory. Indeed, there’s even more going on that hasn’t been announced yet. And, several orders of magnitude further up the food chain, Final Fantasy XIV and GTA Online have already appeared on the Home user’s radar.

And LOOT? LOOT’s a full-blown game studio now, with a mix of proprietary IPs and game porting projects. LOOT’s positioned itself brilliantly as a go-to solution for indie games to be ported and published onto the PlayStation suite of devices.

As one of the largest Home fansites in the world, with an audience measured in the hundreds of thousands, and a dominant presence in Home itself via the News Reader and the LOOT EOD system, we also had to decide what to do next.

The strength of HSM is in its people. For years, we’ve entertained and informed you with some of the best long-form community journalism Home ever had. And though Home itself is ending…that doesn’t mean this team has to end.

It is thus with great pleasure that we announce the HomeStation writing team will be moving over to the revamped LOOT website — www.lootentertainment.com — to form the backbone of the new LOOT community media team!

As a Home-centric product, we knew the day would come when it would be time to either move on or close down. But the reality is that we have so much fun as a team, writing content to share with you, that we see no reason to stop now.

So instead, we’re expanding to cover the games industry, the entertainment industry, advances in technology, business and consumer trends…everything we’ve already honed to a science with HSM, only expanded to cover a canvas much, much larger than Home.

The revamped LOOT website, which is under construction and should be done very soon, will have an entire media section focused on community news and stories (somewhat similar to Gamasutra’s “From the Community” section). That’s where we’ll be.

For LOOT, this creates more recurrent website traffic, which means more eyes on new product announcements as they’re rolled out. (In particular, there just might be something coming up that a lot of Home users will like…)

For HSM, we now get to have a much broader platform upon which to talk about stuff that we think is cool — including non-Home games from your favorite developers whom you got to know in Home.

For you, most importantly: if you’ve enjoyed HomeStation’s particular flavor of wit and wisdom, then we hope you’ll follow us to our new home away from Home — where we will continue to hopefully be a part of your daily reading.

HSM will be around for a bit longer — we still have our concluding stories to publish, including some very touching final articles about Home from the team — before we make the transition. It is our sincere hope that we have, in some way, enriched your PlayStation Home experience. If we have, then we’ve done our jobs. And we’d be thrilled if you continued to read us once we’re underway on the LOOT website.

We’re very grateful to LOOT for giving us this new opportunity to serve as a community media outlet, and we’re exceptionally grateful to you for staying with us all these years. A lot has changed with the games industry during the era when Home came and went; it’s time for us to start writing about it.

At some point, we all have to leave Home. Let’s do it together.

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