[GDC 2011] Time for a New Home
Well, sort of. Sony's prepping a 1.5 update with some interesting tools for developers.
Published: March 11, 2011
Among those that haven't visited in the few years since PlayStation Home first went into an open beta, the mere mention of the service is met with snickers and derision. And, to be fair, that's not an entirely unwarranted reaction to what actually launched when compared with the early demonstrations we were shown -- there's still no Hall of Fame-style Trophy showcase, for instance.
But Home as it was years ago is not Home as it exists now, and much of that has to do with how Home Director Jack Buser and the crew at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe have reacted to the people using the service. What was previously a sort of visual construct to a glorified chat room where people could meet and (hopefully) jump into games together has slowly morphed into a destination all its own. Home itself is now the destination, not merely a means to get into retail or PSN games -- though of course that still is very much a part of the service.
The shift came about, Buser explained at a roundtable breakfast during the Game Developers Conference last week, because of an unsurprising motivator: cash. More to the point, the fact that both Sony and developers that had opted to make interactive points of interest in home that could be monetized were indeed seeing the fruits of that labor pay off.
In terms of raw numbers, the results can't really be argued with: more than 8000 items, among them stalwart examples of microtransactions and avatar customization helped push revenue up 110% over last year. There are now 19 million people that have registered a PSN account, fired up Home, and logged in to walk around at least once. Of the ones that are still active, the average time spend in home is an amazing 70 minutes, most likely due to the fact that there are over 230 bits of interactivity in the US alone (though that includes not just space-specific activities, but stuff like pool tables you can put in your own apartment). Any way you slice it, that's an awful lot of dancing en masse around the avatar of some random girl.
The success of the platform has driven Sony to become something of a platform holder rather than content provider. They already have dozens of developers, from advertisers like Red Bull and Audi that make dedicated areas to pimp their products to big-time publishers with dedicated spaces for their games such as EA's massive gaming lobby to smaller-time operations that exist only in Home.
One of the most prominent examples is developer Outso and publisher Lockwood Interactive's Sodium space. Designed as a kind of upgradable shooter (Sodium One) with outlying mini-games and a social space, Sodium has become a profitable enterprise for Lockwood, who was on hand at the GDC breakfast to talk a bit about the success of building specifically for Home users and taking their feedback, in real time, from the very construct they built. Not only did it help the publisher understand the importance of updating certain parts of the experience to help users move around without getting lost, but it completely changed the business model of Sodium One with the sequel (fittingly dubbed Sodium Two).
But Home as it was years ago is not Home as it exists now, and much of that has to do with how Home Director Jack Buser and the crew at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe have reacted to the people using the service. What was previously a sort of visual construct to a glorified chat room where people could meet and (hopefully) jump into games together has slowly morphed into a destination all its own. Home itself is now the destination, not merely a means to get into retail or PSN games -- though of course that still is very much a part of the service.
The shift came about, Buser explained at a roundtable breakfast during the Game Developers Conference last week, because of an unsurprising motivator: cash. More to the point, the fact that both Sony and developers that had opted to make interactive points of interest in home that could be monetized were indeed seeing the fruits of that labor pay off.
In terms of raw numbers, the results can't really be argued with: more than 8000 items, among them stalwart examples of microtransactions and avatar customization helped push revenue up 110% over last year. There are now 19 million people that have registered a PSN account, fired up Home, and logged in to walk around at least once. Of the ones that are still active, the average time spend in home is an amazing 70 minutes, most likely due to the fact that there are over 230 bits of interactivity in the US alone (though that includes not just space-specific activities, but stuff like pool tables you can put in your own apartment). Any way you slice it, that's an awful lot of dancing en masse around the avatar of some random girl.
The success of the platform has driven Sony to become something of a platform holder rather than content provider. They already have dozens of developers, from advertisers like Red Bull and Audi that make dedicated areas to pimp their products to big-time publishers with dedicated spaces for their games such as EA's massive gaming lobby to smaller-time operations that exist only in Home.
One of the most prominent examples is developer Outso and publisher Lockwood Interactive's Sodium space. Designed as a kind of upgradable shooter (Sodium One) with outlying mini-games and a social space, Sodium has become a profitable enterprise for Lockwood, who was on hand at the GDC breakfast to talk a bit about the success of building specifically for Home users and taking their feedback, in real time, from the very construct they built. Not only did it help the publisher understand the importance of updating certain parts of the experience to help users move around without getting lost, but it completely changed the business model of Sodium One with the sequel (fittingly dubbed Sodium Two).
