The End of PlayStation Home
by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher
On September 26th, 2014, the final closure of PlayStation Home was announced.
“PlayStation Home has been serving the PS3 community since December 2008. During that time, tens of millions of users around the world have grown the social gaming platform into a thriving community of creative and enthusiastic gamers.
“Due to a shifting landscape, PlayStation Home will cease publishing new content on November 12, 2014. Gamers in the U.S. and Canada will be able to download content until December 3, 2014. As a token of our tremendous gratitude to the community, we will also be releasing a series of free content prior to the platform’s closure on March 31, 2015.
“We would like to thank all of our fans for their support of the PlayStation Home platform over the years.”
This is an interesting moment. HomeStation has publicly owned a pro-Sony, pro-Home, pro-developer stance. Our mission, as a publication, was to be the literary journal of this remarkable social experiment, and provide constructive and reasoned feedback that could help, in some oblique way, to shape the evolution of the platform and its content.
We succeeded.
And now it comes to an end.
This is an interesting moment because, for those who stayed with Home all these years, Home was never just a game. Right or wrong, it became an integral part of many peoples’ lives.
But all things change, and change is inevitable. It’s important to accept that change.
When you pour yourself into something, it’s hard to accept the finality of its ending. In the last 1,675 days or so, fifty-seven different authors have produced a combined total of over 2,200 long-form articles, machinima pieces, magazine issues and more. At least one new story, every day, for the last four years.
That is a staggering amount of product output for an all-volunteer publication. If the average HSM article’s word count is about 1200 words, that means we’ve produced the equivalent of thirty-five novels’ worth of material, the vast majority of it focused solely on PlayStation Home.
This isn’t just a fansite. This is an archive.
Go back and reread this site’s stories, and you can actually see a remarkable saga of the evolution of the world’s first console-based social network for gamers. And when it comes to audience penetration inside Home itself, no one established a stronger footprint than HomeStation. That success was earned.
And now it comes to an end.
So yeah, it’s an interesting moment. When confronted with the finality of something coming to an end — something you’ve put a lot of yourself into — it forces you to evaluate how it all turned out.
Personally…I’m happy. I’m the PlayStation Home fan who became a PlayStation Home developer. My fingerprints are on Home virtual goods. My promotional videos and words have appeared on the PlayStation Blog. My thoughts helped shape content and market strategies for more than one dev house. My girlfriend and I met because of Home. It’s basically the ultimate Home fan’s fantasy, and I got to live it. And now I’m the product manager for a Sony game development studio, producing PS4 games for a living. So yeah, things turned out really, really well for me.
Success stories
Interestingly enough, though: the biggest emotional takeaway I have from Home is the camaraderie. The wonderful friendships that were forged. In particular, the last several years spent with this fantastic team has been its own reward, because they really are a remarkable group of people. And it’s been a blast to meet so many of my fellow Home developers; we’re a small fraternity that shared something special, as it’s not often you get to be at the bleeding edge of a new frontier.
My advice: we can bang on about all the “if onlys” — all the things Home could have been — but frankly that time has passed, and it’s time to celebrate what Home was.
Home had a great run. Remember, Home’s original concept was drafted two console generations ago. If you had started in Home’s closed beta as a thirteen-year-old — the minimum allowable age in SCEA — you would today be a legal adult. Attending college. Think about that.
Home began its earliest known development nearly a decade ago, in 2005. Back then, Facebook was practically unknown, YouTube was barely off the ground, and Twitter didn’t exist. That might give you an idea of just how much things have changed. That Home managed to stay relevant and profitable for such a long run is a testament to the many people who were a part of its story behind the scenes.
Still. The question remains: NOW what?
Honestly, this feels like the last hurrah during the senior year of high school. Finals are done, everyone’s eyes are on the horizon, and it’s time for those bittersweet goodbyes. It’s time for those last wonderful moments of youth before we all grow up and go our separate ways.
The reality is that our function, as a publication, has come to an end.
This is not a failure, but rather a success story: everything HomeStation Magazine set out to achieve — every single thing – is now accomplished.
So it’s time to move on.
PlayStation Home had its day in the sun. As did HomeStation Magazine. It’s been a privilege to serve you, and we hope you’ve enjoyed reading us for the last four years. If we have in some way enriched your Home experience, then we did our jobs. We’ll continue for a little while longer here with concluding stories from the team, and then we’ll pull the trigger on the last article this site will ever publish.
BUT. That’s not the end of the story. There’s a plan in place for this phenomenal team of writers, artists and filmmakers. An even greater spotlight awaits. And we will announce that exciting new endeavor very soon. We hope that, when we finally break the news, you’ll choose to follow us and check out our new venture.
PlayStation Home was a mirror held up to us; it reflected back to us what we projected onto it. It was one of the most unique — and ambitious — experiments ever attempted in the history of video gaming, and I have little doubt that the ripples of its legacy will, in various ways, reverberate back toward us in the future.
At some point, we all have to leave Home for the last time. May you find what you were looking for. May all of us.
September 27th, 2014 by NorseGamer | 8 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
LinkedIn
TwitterShare
| Tweet |
Great piece Norse.
I know a lot of people are devastated about Home and the Home groups on Facebook are full of emotional thoughts right now but everyone needs to keep their heads up high and just remember all of the great experiences we had.
Free Realms, which closed back on March 31st was also receiving emotional feedback but from mostly young teens and pre-teens and it was heartbreaking to see some of those babies’ reactions, but life is a big show and the show must go on.
We’re all so glad about what you yourself and Terra put together here at HSM and so glad to see the success you two are having Norse.
I personally would like to thank you guys for giving me the opportunity to write briefly for you guys and I’m happy to say that my few little articles made some kind of contribution to this great publication.
I left when school and my broadcasting career got in the way (Which I’m proud of, love my career) plus my own blog which I’m trying to grow but I’m so thankful that you guys welcomed me and other writers in so kindly and it really means a lot.
I can’t wait to see what you guys have planned for the future. I know Hellfire Games and Veemee are working on what look like Home style games which I’m very excited about and I think can make us breathe a little easier.
So I just wanted to say thanks a bunch for everything Norse and best of luck to you guys moving forward, I’ll be watching!
All the best,
Colin AKA cjmp
Now we will never know when Home will come out of beta
To all the HSM team members past, present and beyond… Job well done!
Well, I always told myself that Home was like a movie, enjoyed and then gone … BUT …Sony says “loads of free content will be offered” towards the end.
[crosses fingers] Does this by chance mean I’ll be able to download my personal spaces (80+ on one account; 30+ on a second)and avatars with wardrobes to my PS3s hard drives? Even if we must lose rewards and (I suppose, public spaces) this would be great! Otherwise, what good is stuff that will be gone almost as soon as it’s offered?
Because of coordination issues, I can’t play shooters, so games are of no use to me.
Anyway, thanks for Home!If nothing else, I’ll still have great memories!
:^/ A keepable, offline version of Home would be useful for machinima, etc. Especially if one could host guests from one’s friends list. One thing Home offered more than any other PS3 title was a venue for users’ creativity. I’ll miss that.
Machinima UGC is probably Home’s most unique use case. It’s through machinima that part of the core appeal of Home — living inside a video game world with a wide selection of settings, costumes, etc. — is most fully realized. And it’s probably the hardest aspect of Home to truly replicate.
There are options, though…with more coming.
Desperately unhappy if I have to give up making my videos. Machinima-making in Home has become the passion in my life. Just reeling from the shock now. I will have to find a new site to use for avatar/actors, set locations, and items/props. Not to mention all the great LMOs. If you have something up your sleeve, Norse, for all us ‘crafty’ folks who have gotten into film making in Home, you need to tell us before we commit group hara-kiri.
Does LOOT have something up its sleeve?
…Maaaaybe.
In the interim, you might want to check out the PS4’s SHAREfactory feature: http://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/ps4/sharefactory/
End of an era, a shame. Had the Home staff actually put forth some effort by doing things like fixing the ongoing chronic problems, punishing troublemakers, having real patrolling mods on there like back in ’09, done far better advertising along with video game tie-ins, and actually listening to its legions of users, we’d have had a PS4 port on the coming horizon by now. Home will forever be remembered as a product with great potential that regretfully it never lived up to. Since late ’08 when Open Beta debuted, I’ve been a regular on Home and made some really awesome online friends. But despite all of Home’s flaws and self-inflicted wounds, I will miss visiting this virtual world when it ends. We still have the good friends that we met on there, and in the end I think that’s what’s most important of all.