PlayStation Home has always been an odd feature on PS3. Partially an answer to Second-Life, the virtual world offered gamers a place to hangout, socialize, experience events, and new types of games. From avatars, to custom and decked out homes, PlayStation Home was the party to attend if it was your thing. While not a selling feature of the PS3, many gamers enjoyed the extended worlds from Uncharted, LittleBigPlanet, and Resistance which offered new places to explore and mini games to play for free. As the PS3 approaches year nine, the service will also bow out on March 31, 2015 and according to PlayStation’s former Home Architect Oscar Clark, it was a ‘massive success.‘
After the jump, we have his full thoughts.
It was a massive success that everyone thinks was a failure. Although it wasn’t as successful as it could have been for a variety of reasons. Getting a clear strategy was difficult and it ended up being a compromise. That said, it was a pretty effective compromise in most cases. We did see a gradual evolution towards making a much more playable experience, a bigger range of games.
Clark went on to explain that while games in Home originally lacked complexity and thrills, the service would eventually offer a compelling platform to build on:
If you’re comparing some of Home’s early-day content to futuristic racer Sodium 2, which arrived later, the service has definitely come on leaps and bounds. You could play bloody Wipeout in PlayStation Home! It was called Sodium 2 but it was basically Wipeout. They had a full MMO. Could they have done better? If they were companies with bigger pockets, sure
So why did the service never fully catch on? According to Clark, it was a lack of will power from Japan to fully implement Home to the fore of thePS3.
We were investing in the experience over time, but the one thing we would never get was the one thing that really mattered. I needed to be able to exit a game to [get to] Home. Everyone thought it was going to be the other way around. Everyone thought it would be a game launching into a new game from Home, but that wasn’t the key.
The key was getting away from your game. You finish playing your game, you go to Home so you can meet the other players, talk in character, have a bit of a laugh, then go and play something else. And we couldn’t’ convince the Japanese team to do that, the system software guys. There were a whole bunch of technical reasons, but the primary thing was that there wasn’t the political will internally to really invest in it being a replacement of the cross-media bar. It needed to be the place where you chose the content and where you returned to after.
And why does Clark see Home as a success? The numbers it seems and they don’t lie.
38 million downloads, 3 million monthly active users, this is at the peak… that’s not a failure. I genuinely think it was successful from a commercial point of view. It showed you could make money. There were like 20, 30 studios that made money out of home. Like five or six that made a million and a half a year, which is not big in the scheme of things, but individually those studios did pretty well. It made it possible for companies like nDreams and Lockwood to be companies at all. So it spawned a whole bunch of people doing interesting stuff. It spawned a whole load of lessons of what could be done in a social context on console. It taught me a hell of a lot.
Discuss:
Would you like to see PlayStation Home come to PS4?
[Via techradar]