It's The Beginning of The End for Sony's Console-Based Virtual World, Playstation Home

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Playstation Home, Sony's answer to the virtual world boom of the mid-to-late '00s, will be closing its digital doors worldwide on March 15th 2015, after about 7 years in operation.

At the time of its release (at the height of the Second Life publicity bubble) Playstation Home was surrounded by equal parts hype and skepticism. During the game's debut period, NWN's own Hamlet Au wrote a piece about how Home was doomed to fail based on shortcomings he saw when it was held up against Second Life and its competitors. "After an initial burst of post-launch interest," he wrote, "I would be extremely surprised if Sony Home garnered more than a few hundred thousand recurring users, or if it's not discontinued outright by the end of 2009."

But Home did last (albeit quietly) for years, and its closing probably shouldn't read as failure.

Although many players tried it out, got bored and left (much like what happened in SL at the time) others stuck around. It undoubtedly benefited from the fact that there was (and continues to be) precious little virtual world competition on consoles. On the other hand, unlike the other worlds it shared the limelight with, Home didn't have user-created content and its users were overwhelmingly male. Since its launch talk of Home had also petered out even while its existing community persisted. Occasionally it popped back into press consciousness when someone wanted to point out that it was still turning a respectable profit for Sony or that, in the words of one developer, it's "not shit." 

So why is it closing now? Well, aside from the usual hazy PR talk about priorities and focus and so on (and the inevitable loss of users over time with few new ones to replace them) the answer probably has a lot to do with the PS4, too. One year after Sony's next-gen console was released, they naturally want to begin easing out of services for their last-gen hardware. Are they going to make a Home port for PS4? Probably not. As great as virtual worlds are/can be, that high-visibility boom period is over, and porting something like Home to new hardware is probably not an appealing expense at this point. So it's not necessarily that Home is "finally" flopping, but more that the nature of console gaming means that its days were numbered from the start.

That said, if you've never given this console-based virtual world a try (and you happen to have a PS3 hanging around) don't waste the chance to check it out while you still can.

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[UCMO]

I used it briefly a few years ago... I didn't see any way to create content and so, lost any interest in it.

[melponeme_k]

Another one bites the dust....

But SL keeps going.

All of you still don't realize that LL is a titan in the infant VR industry.

Not even FB's hypothetical 3D "world" is a sure thing.

What is a sure thing is that they need people like the people in SL. Dedicated users. And all signs point to there being very few dedicated VR users.

All newcomers are fighting for the same audience. An audience on lockdown with SL. Just like new MMORPGs are fighting for the same audience from WOW.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Melponeme, Home and SL weren't exactly competitors. Different, but similar markets. Dedicated Home users were a lot like Dedicated SL users, dedicated and willing to spend money. It's sad that they're shutting it down, I expected they'd keep it up 3 more years. It does things "right" that SL doesn't, and vice versa. If you want games, Home's the place to be, not even SL's new "experience" tools can match what can be done in Home.

But when it comes to in-world communities...thanks to it's groups, LL does it better. In Home originally you could be in only "one" club at a time (later upped to 5), and only own one club, and clubs can only have 32 members.

Home also has officially licensed content. Official Pottermore and Dr. Who stuff, for example.

I think home's faults reduced it's appeal.

1. SCEA never really marketed/promoted the thing well, or explained why one might use it.

2. Like SL, it's serious time-sink. For gamers, they might see Home as reducing their time for the full-priced games. I liked it, but I also had games and SL. Only so much free time.

3. The micro-transaction centric nature of Home might have turned lots of people off.

4. Home might have been useful as a "lobby" to organize multiplayer games...if more games had what is called "Full game launching" within home.

5. Many games that could have benefited from a link to home, didn't have Home spaces. Games that had home spaces tended to be Dudebro-gamer centric. Also most games don't have Home related awards. Meaning play the game, get stuff for Home.

6. The best way to find out what was going on in Home...was to be in Home. Home wasn't like SL where there's lots of interaction outside of SL. (Like here, blogs, SLU) So people who had tried it early on in 2008-2009, when there wasn't as much "stuff to do" would be unlikely to learn about added spaces.

7. The load times. When you go to a space, you download it, sort of like Blue Mars. (which was VERY Home-ish) While you don't leave where you are while you're downloading it, it does take time. And once it is downloaded, it will take time to start up. Admittedly once it's loaded...it's loaded and looks damn good. But people did complain about the wait, just like SL users complain about how long it takes places/textures to rez.

Home did do other things right, for example mirrors work as mirrors in Home. It also doesn't surprise me that SL's new Mesh avatars resemble those of Home.

Home always was a weird thing...one of those SCEE projects, like the eyetoy.