Playstation Home Closes Doors After 6 Years in Open Beta

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

Yesterday was your last chance to revisit Playstation Home, the virtual world exclusive to the Playstation 3 console. After 6 years of operation and no official release out of beta, the console-only virtual world has been shut off for good.

I'll admit that the headline may seem damning, but by all accounts Home wasn't a wholly unsuccessful product, even if it never technically left its beta phase...

Home developed a dedicated community and it was apparently quite profitable -- which is easy to understand as the world was loaded with monetization. Users could buy items (made by third parties contracted by Sony) to customize their avatars and virtual apartments, while companies could buy themed ad spaces or promote themselves through items given to users. In a farewell stream hosted by gaming site GiantBomb, you'll see people darting around dressed as Dr Pepper vending machines or promotional Subway drink cups which in turn are advertising the Uncharted games like some sort of promotional ouroborous. You'll also see a go kart racing game sponsored by Clearasil, in which you have to collect assorted Clearasil products for a speed bonus. It's kind of shameless, to be honest, but you could consider it a vision into what Second Life might have looked like if Linden Lab hadn't given so much content control to the users.

... Then again, GiantBomb's stream also isn't a particularly flattering depiction of Home's capabilities. For a slightly more well-rounded perspective, it's worth checking out this post from Eurogamer that includes some first-hand accounts from users about their last moments in Playstation Home.

Playstation Home's closure is probably due to a number of reasons, including the fact that services for the PS3 are inevitably going to be pared down as time passes and a PS4 port of Home likely didn't seem worth the trouble. I do wonder where the Home community will go next. Will other (mostly PC-based) virtual worlds like Second Life see an influx of 'Homers', or will they stick with their consoles and congregate in MMOs instead?

If you have any memories of Playstation Home, feel free to share them in the comments below.

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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

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Yeah, I have memories, I was in the second phase of the Closed Beta for Home. Had to confirm an NDA and everything. I mentioned Home a few times on the blog:

http://ccslfashionista.blogspot.com/2013/09/playstation-home-what-blue-mars-wanted.html

Home always reminded me of SL, and Blue Mars in certain ways, though Home and SL excel at different things, as I've said on NWN before:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2014/09/playstation-home-closing.html

I think one of the problems with home, at least in the US, was that SCEA was so afraid to marketing to anyone not a dudebro gamer after the Xbox became so sucessful in the US, that they ignored it. Home was an SCEE developed thing, like the Eyetoy and PS3 Eye, SCEE was less afraid of marketing Playstation stuff to non-dudebros

So that people who messed with home early on when there wasn't much content or things to do, and then left...didn't find out about all the stuff added in.

Then again, Home was time consuming in the same way SL is, and people who wanted to play their games, probably didn't have the time to log in. And Home had so much "stuff" that it was overwhelming. Mini-golf, poker, bowling, chess, space combat, third person combat, arcade games, othello. The only thing rivaling home for the amount of different things you could do was FreeRealms...which is also defunct. (I had lifetime premium membershipsfor both the PC and PS3 versions)

I forgot to log in yesterday, sad to say. I had SEVERAL "Home Spaces", including the Mansion so I had permanent access to the X7 club shown in the Giantbomb video and permanent VIP status within X7.

One of the saddest things is that they took out Saucer Pop, which was one of my favorite mini-games. Admittedly, Novus Prime and Sodium had more depth, but Saucer Pop was just fun.

There's nothing really that can replace Home now.

[zz bottom]

I logged in when it 1st appeared for a few times, not even knowing on that time what was Second Life.
And when i did finally found Second Life i stopped using my ps3 (still getting dust after all these years) never to went back.