Playstation Home, we hardly knew ye

[WestofHouse]

Sony announced on Friday that they are pulling the plug on Playstation Home. I can't say I'm surprised. I researched it when I first got my PS3 and couldn't find one compelling reason to install it. It's a shame. A virtual environment such as that could be great if done right.

 

Full story HERE.

[Mord]

I installed it for shits and giggles after I upgraded my Slim to 1TB.

 

I walked around the room a bit... and... yeah, I couldn't really see it taking off myself.

 

Plus the nickel & diming for everything under the sun. My being fairly resistant to outright hostile on DLC issues kept me from ever buying any 'addons' for Home of course, as I figured something like this would come eventually. Going to suck for the (likely few) people that actually bought stuff for Home.

[IntyPod Burgertime]

I need to visit someone's place in Playstation Home. That's the last trophy I need to 100% it.

 

And to be perfectly fair, the only thing I spent money on inside of Home was the Intellivision Gen 2 games. Every single trophy could be obtained through all of the free stuff I got over the years.

Edited September 27, 2014 by IntyPod Burgertime

[+Atari_Warlord]

The last time I visited home was before the PSN outage. I was always annoyed that every time I went in it would have to download a bunch of update files. I also thought it was fairly pointless without the voice chat.

[Gabriel]

Can't say I'll miss it.

 

It was a concept with such potential, and it was squandered in a stereotypically corporate style.

[Jess Ragan]

Playstation Home WAS a surprise! Surprisingly crappy!

 

I remember wandering around in this nightmare of advertising during the brief time I owned a PS3. I'd go back in if the rumors are true that Sony is giving away free PSOne games to anyone who braves its filthy waters of shameless marketing, but I sure wouldn't do it for nostalgia's sake.

[onmode-ky]

I for one am going to miss PS Home. While it's true that it didn't become what it was first envisioned to be, and it's true that most of its third-party publishers' revenues seem to come from avatar clothes/animations/companions rather than from their games and spaces, I always thought there were plenty of interesting things to do in Home even as a free player (personally, the only paid-for things I will lose when Home closes are the Konami Scramble and Super Cobra in-Home games (my Time Pilot and Scribble Shooter will remain playable on the PSV) and a few R-Type figures that I bought when Irem was about to, well, give up on video games).

 

 

And I have to thank Home for letting me build my own arcade, which I could never do in real life. Much less an arcade in a floating temple.

 

 

Still, while building and decorating your own spaces, or outfitting your avatar, has a certain Sims/Minecraft-style charm to it (though not on that scale, of course), that part is more like the epilogue to the various activities available. That is, you got those items as rewards from playing games; for example, there's the demon-slaying game from Granzella where you take down a giant rampaging centipede demon, either by yourself or in a group (there are better games in Home, but I like this screenshot I took):

 

 

And while I wouldn't say there are any absolutely must-play games in Home (for one thing, I think many of them have frustrating collision detection), playing them and talking strategy about them are catalysts for the thing that I'll personally miss the most about Home: meeting cool people from around the world. It sort of becomes like a giant virtual reality chat room about video games. Of course, you'll meet people whom you hope get banned, like with any public forum, but there are normal people, too! Japan Home lets me practice my Japanese; Asian Home lets me practice my Chinese; North American Home . . . lets me practice my Canadian? Eh? Note, of course, that to really get the most out of Home in this respect, you need to attach a keyboard to your PS3.

 

So, in the end, it's not what it was intended to be, but it's not as terrible as it's sometimes made out to be, either. I didn't participate all that much in Home over its 6 years of life (but I do remember its very first day; that was a rough experience for sure), but I will miss it.

 

if the rumors are true that Sony is giving away free PSOne games

That was no rumor, but as it was a while ago, I don't think you can get them anymore. Destruction Derby, Warhawk, and Twisted Metal were given as voucher codes from the space that promoted the PS4; a later continuation of that space included a voucher code for Resident Evil, I think it was (I never redeemed that one myself).

 

onmode-ky

 

P.S. To those of you big Home spenders whose expenditures kept Home running this long and allowed me to participate in my own, free way, thank you.

 

P.P.S. I have to mention that one of the coolest things about Home was a 12-week event early in its life: Xi was a 2009 alternate reality game based in Home that had players around the world working together to solve its real-world puzzles and get to the bottom of a conspiracy. The puzzles were fun, and the Home portion even included a pair of text adventure games! I don't think the PS3 ever got any other text adventures; if you'd like to play them, I do believe they're still available, now in the Xi Museum space.

[onmode-ky]

PS Home has been gone for about 1.5 months now, and I felt like putting up a few of my screenshots taken toward the end of its life.

 

Let's start with this shot, of the sky over the "Granzella Plaza in Twilight" public space. Granzella, the developer formed from former Irem employees, was one of Home's third-party publishers. They ran the final North American Home event, a competition that ran for a few weeks before and after Halloween consisting of points-based races run in this space. Granzella's farewell to Home was written in their sky after the event.

 

 

Next is another shot of a sky, in the Aurora public space from publisher nDreams (developers of the Xi game I mentioned in my previous post). At the end of 2014, nDreams altered this space so that it had a red sky, fires and smoke everywhere, and enemy ships flying around. Not really an event, since it was just appearance, it came with messages urging players of the game to keep earning points to repel the attack. Eventually, through global accumulated points (or maybe just via an invisible timer), the attack was repelled. The space went back to normal, but with this giant message in the sky, nDreams' farewell to Home.

 

 

One of Home's third-party publishers who attempted to build a Home successor was madmunki. Toward that end, in late 2014, they released the neotopia hub apartment private space in Home to help raise funds. In that space were a lot of easter eggs, one of which printed their farewell message in the sky (seeing a pattern?). Theirs was long, though, so I only have the first part in this screenshot. By the way, my avatar's head in this is a giant medicine pill, but because you're seeing it directly from behind, it looks like a sphere. Disclaimer: I did not/could not unlock that message myself; that isn't my space.

 

 

Now let's come to a farewell from Sony themselves. Sadly, only SCEJ ran a first-party final event (i.e., it was only accessible if you had a Japanese PSN account), but if you could participate, you got a big show. Formatted as a 6-episode, partly interactive mini-series, it was presented from mid-October through mid-November, making it not just the last JP Home event, but also the overall last Home event because it ran beyond the end of Granzella's NA event (I should note that Home and its regular games continued to operate through the first 3 months of 2015, just with no further events organized on a schedule). Each episode was either half an hour or an hour long, and the story ran thus: Sony's Toro and Kuro try to show off a new Home AI technology, but it gets hijacked by a pair of ghosts (who had appeared in previous Halloweens' events). Toro, Kuro, and a remnant of the AI pursue them through various public spaces, freeing each from attacks by enemies invading from Sony games; I think the cause was that the AI tech was breaking down the walls between cyber worlds. They are assisted by third-party publisher characters from those spaces, and also by Sony hero characters from the same games as the enemies. At the end of it all . . . I could no longer read Japanese fast enough to fully understand (so this could be wrong), but the ghosts had stolen the tech with generally good intentions, something about saving Home from destruction. Everyone, even the ghosts, had to join together to seal all the breaches, and there was a lot of self-sacrificing going on. The final episode was kind of sad. But, the turmoil ceased, and everyone said their good-byes. In this shot, from left to right, Sony's Maou-sama/Overlord Badman (from the What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? series), Kitten/Kat (from Gravity Daze/Rush), Kuro, Toro, a LocoRoco, and Red Hood (from Soul Sacrifice) say their farewells to the audience.

 

 

Now let's come to my own final farewell. Here's my avatar (still with the pill head, viewed from head on so that it again looks like a sphere) waving good-bye, at most 1-2 minutes before Home was shut down for the last time, probably more like ~30 seconds before. I say "for the last time" because Home went offline every week at that time for a few hours of maintenance; it didn't come back this time.

 

 

And then there was nothing. . . . Bah, I don't want to end on such a down note. Let's see some fun stuff. For starters, here's the R-Type R-9A Arrowhead hat, with R-Type kimono, that I won years ago in my Asia Home account.

 

 

Have you ever seen a sexy woman with a beehive "do"? . . . Yeah, me neither.

 

 

Both Dragon's Lair and Space Ace had virtual merchandise available in Home (or at least NA Home). Here's someone wearing a Space Ace Kimberly suit.

 

 

Of course, you didn't have to buy a costume to make a costume. The person on the right in this picture took some non-licensed avatar equipment and made what seems to be an obvious Botan cosplay, from the classic manga/anime Yu Yu Hakusho (I'm da bomb the guy with the bomb head).

 

 

If you did want to use official costumes, JP Home did have multiple anime and games represented, like Macross Frontier, Galaxy Express 999 (surprisingly also available in NA Home), Evangelion, and Black Rock Shooter. Here are two avatars dressed as Asuka and Rei from Evangelion. I believe these were actually the same person, simultaneously logged in on two accounts.

 

 

It's uncommon enough to see someone log in with two accounts . . . but how about FOUR?! I once encountered four identically dressed avatars, with very similar usernames, taking turns doing what was basically level-grinding at one of the games in a public space. So, one person using four PS3s in close proximity, all logged into JP Home simultaneously. When they were done, they gave a synchronized dancing show (!) for photo ops and then logged out.

 

 

Me, I'm more the type of guy to build an arcade room with a huge aquarium on top of a quartet of cabs.

 

 

To close out this post with an Atari flavor, have you ever seen Adventure's Yorgle wearing a jet pack?

 

 

What about Yorgle impaled into the back of a white tiger? Damn it, Yorgle, that's an endangered species! Wait . . . y-you don't think he's trying to help it breed, do you?

 

 

onmode-ky

Edited May 13, 2015 by onmode-ky

[+save2600]

I was and am still too busy downloading updates to the system, PSN network, games themselves and the PS store to have ever noticed anything called a Playstation Home.

[moycon]

Cool pics onmode-ky. I only visited Home a few times. It was interesting, but not compelling enough to make me want to keep coming back.

[Giltygear]

First day I logged into Home:

 

"Wow. What a disappointment."

 

Last day Home was online:

 

"Wow. What a disappointment. Why do I have to download 3GB of data to stand in the mall for 10 mins before I log off and uninstall?"

 

It had so much potential, but in the end it was all for naught.

[onmode-ky]

Cool pics onmode-ky. I only visited Home a few times. It was interesting, but not compelling enough to make me want to keep coming back.

Thanks. In its first year, I visited Home maybe once a week, just to watch it grow and change (sloooowly). Eventually, activity started to pick up, and since a lot of it was stuff that didn't interest me, the gaps between my visits began getting bigger. I'd go back in for things like E3, but then there would be months of absence. Late in 2013, though, during my sporadic visits, I started finding things that I thought were interesting, like a game that was sort of an MMORPG-lite. Various activities with stat-tracking and character growth had been added in my absence, and those caught my eye; maybe it's just the OCD talking, but if you put a growth percentage meter in your game, and it's both challenging and free, I'm going to want to come back and make that thing hit 100%. Those aspects, combined with finding a few people with whom to talk strategies and such, were what made me a fairly frequent visitor in the final year.

 

It wasn't the prospect of finding Yorgle engaged in drunken debauchery which compelled me to return. Really, it wasn't.

 

onmode-ky