Wow, PlayStation Home. That sure was a thing. When I first got my PS3 back in 2010, my initial excitement was somewhat tempered by one simple fact: I didn't have many games. Up until that point, I had mostly been a "Nintendo kid", and much investment had been made into building up my library of Wii games. However, like any hormonal teenager, my interest in the more mature offerings Sony and Microsoft touted started to grow. Thus, the Christmas budget went towards a new system... And not much else. While my list of available titles grew, the fact remained I had an expensive piece of hardware in front of me that I felt I needed to do something with when the sheen wore off of my latest acquisitions.
Hey, what's that little icon I never noticed before?
It starts off the way many virtual social spaces do, with you being asked to create an avatar, dress it in some basic clothes and then being dropped into a cozy-if-bland apartment that you call home. After that, you're free to get out, explore and socialize. I gotta say - while I remember the character creator being surprisingly robust, at least with regards to face sculpting, I also remember it being damn near impossible to make a person that looked anything resembling "normal". Dark Souls' character creation comes to mind. Eventually I got tired of messing around with it and settled on an avatar that might have looked a little like me... If you stretched me out on a taffy puller, hit me over the head with a mallet and then forced me to cut my own hair. Never in all my time with Home was I ever really happy about my character's face, but much like in real life, you don't have to worry about it anymore after you find some stylish masks or helmets to cover all of that up.
Once you're out on the town, you would find there was a surprising degree of interactivity and verisimilitude to the various locales in Home, at least insofar as everything feeling like it was purpose-built. There was one big main plaza connecting to a number of other "core" experiences. The two main gathering points I remember were the bowling alley and the arcade. The bowling alley had plenty of seating for people who wanted to sit down and converse, and yes, you could actually bowl. It was as simple a bowling minigame as they come, but you could just walk up with a couple of friends or even complete strangers and start playing. It was also probably realistic to a fault, because if all the lanes were taken you had to wait your turn to play. The arcade naturally had a few playable games of its own where you could go for high-scores and prizes. There were even some cabinets that gave you the option to play games you owned "in" Home (really just serving as alternate launching point for said games). In either place, players would naturally congregate and commingle, and the hustle and bustle combined with the activity happening in the background made things feel surprisingly alive despite the sometimes uncannily quiet and static avatars populating it. There were more connectors to similar locations, as well as areas specifically dedicated to bridge into the various promotional "Spaces", but more on those later. I really need to talk about the Mall.
The Mall was exactly what you would expect: A huge, multi-layered shopping center where you could browse shops and pick out goods to complement your new digital lifestyle. Traversing the stairs and walkways, you'd see that each store had its own unique signage and even displayed their wares on stands and mannequins. There were your basic Sony-provided vendors, as well as stores offering in-game items based on the hot PS3 titles of the time. There were even some "designer" outlets that sold virtual goods specifically created for Home, some of which were based on real-world brands. And no, these goods weren't just limited to clothing or accessories for your avatar. You could also purchase furnishings for your apartment or even brand new "Personal Spaces" for Home. The Personal Spaces deserve special note, because while they were just additional spaces for you to decorate and mingle in, they often came with their own minigames and even unique items that you could obtain. Of course, when I say purchase, I don't mean with some kind of in-game currency. This game is free-to-play. They have to make money somehow! So if you want to take anything with you, you're going to need to bust out that physical, tangible wallet of yours. Given this was in a time where "optional purchases" were becoming more and more commonplace, it may not have been as shocking as you might initially assume. Then you look at the sticker prices. Even the most extreme examples of microtransactions in the console market at the time would run you a few dollars for some petty in-game content that would make you feel good about yourself, which is the most common form of microtransaction today. In PlayStation Home, this was just about everything. Clothes? Money. Hairstyles? Money. Furniture? Money. Houses? Obviously money. Maybe even more than you initially anticipated! There was at least one mansion you could buy that would later be updated with purchasable extra floors. That's right: You could buy DLC for your DLC. At first you might not shake your head at too much of it, but when everything from shoes to seaside shacks cost anywhere from half a buck to fifteen dollars, all of this is going to add up super quick. It's actually hysterical looking back at it now, if only because it seems like Home was way ahead of its time in all of the wrong ways. A virtual platform where you can chill out with others decked out in designer fits, lounging in curated digital spaces that are littered with transient treasures you purchased with real cash. Does that sound eerily familiar? I know Sony was hardly the first to break out into this field, but they were the first I can think of to present it to such a wide audience and install base, especially one with such a significant amount of young users. I don't know how much Sony and its affiliates ultimately made off of Home, but I suspect that while it might not have been enough to justify a replacement after its eventual closure in 2015, it was probably more than enough to have made the whole endeavor worthwhile.
So yeah, it was a bit questionable in a few ways. But do you think I cared about any of that as a kid? Of course not! I cared about video games, mate, and Home knew that. That's why they were trying to sell me games while I was already playing games.
There was a good number of "Game Spaces" or "Developer Spaces" you could explore and they were bizarre. Most of them were effectively just promotions for various PS3 titles or the relevant developers/publishers. Obviously Sony had a few of their own, with spaces for LittleBigPlanet, inFamous and Uncharted just being a handful of examples. You also had companies like Capcom, Namco and even Nippon Ichi or IREM getting in on the action. The spaces themselves were usually either areas ripped straight from the games or more generic locations that were simply themed after the property in question. You could walk around, interact with things, get little promotional items for your character and their apartment, and see content direct from developers about what they were working on at the time (admittedly one of the cooler aspects of Home). Sometimes there would even be minigames that you could partake in, and you'd be rewarded with prizes if you performed well enough. Obviously, these spaces by and large just wanted to sell you stuff - I seem to recall some of them would even provide links directly to the games on the PlayStation Store, and there were the obligatory "gift shops" where you could spend real money on items - but it would be unfair to say that there wasn't some creativity evident in how they were implemented. I remember that the Resident Evil 5 space had the opening area of the game framed as a film set, implying the events transpiring were all just part of a movie. The SIREN Lounge had a minigame where you had to navigate a hospital avoiding Shibito, and other players could actually watch you try to escape. IREM in particular went way harder than they had any real reason to, with a whole festival square containing a bunch of stands where you could play simple carnival games and earn prizes and trinkets themed after titles like R-Type. Going to a new space always felt sort of like visiting a theme park and leaving with a bunch of souvenirs. In an ironic twist, these locations designed around marketing were some of the most generous in the whole of Home, allowing you to get an armload of items for free in a game with such a heavy focus on cash purchases.
There was definitely original content made for Home, though, aside from just the generic Sony-provided spaces. In particular, I remember spending a lot of time in the "Sodium Hub", which was a space that had an entire story and game tied into it. I don't recall all of the details, but it was a futuristic setting taking place on a far-off moon or something of the sort. There was an A.I. named VICKIE who would guide you through everything, and the hub was a bar connected to a number of other facilities. The main attraction was a game called "Salt Shooter" where you would pilot a hovertank and shoot at waves of targets. There was actually some depth to the game, with upgrades and progression - ooooooh! It really wasn't anything that special, but rankings were tracked across players which sort of made you want to try to get a good score. There were a few other diversions thrown in for good measure, too, like a game where you stomped on space scorpions. I dunno, either. Of course, if you wanted access to later parts of the minigames or perhaps the coveted "VIP lounge", you would have to drop a bit of money on some items. Still, I seem to remember thinking it was a cool hangout spot and probably one of the better places to kill time in Home. I'm given to understand there were a few more updates to it by the time Home was shut down for good, but I sadly never experienced those myself.
In hindsight, I'm not really sure what it is that drew me to Home. The fact that it was free-to-play was certainly a factor, but I'm not sure that I was really in the target audience otherwise. I wasn't exactly the most social teen, even in online spaces where I had the benefit of anonymity, and I didn't have a lot of disposable income to fritter and waste on virtual living spaces and doo-dads. Not to say that it stopped me from making purchases - a fair portion of birthday money definitely went towards some personal hangout spaces and fancy outfits for my character. "Hangout" spaces in name only, because I was almost always the only person actually in them. But they were... Mine? I suppose that's the only way I can justify it in my head. They felt exclusive and valuable, and I could decorate them any way I liked and just admire what I had created for myself, shelves and tables lined with all of the baubles and trophies I had collected during my time with Home. Perhaps it was a crossroads of my love for furnishing virtual homes in games like Animal Crossing and The Sims, my fascination with always-online multiplayer environments, and the fact that every item I acquired had a sort of "history" to it after my hours spent exploring. Home was a weird, hollow, and frankly kind of greedy experiment by Sony, but one that I happily partook in. I'm really glad I got that out of my system early, because I'm fearful of where I might otherwise be today in light of recent industry trends.
I'm obviously not the only person that harbors some nostalgia for it, though. There has been a concentrated effort by fans to revive the platform, and it seems they're making some real progress. Like any shared online space, plenty of players seem to have made some genuine connections throughout their experiences with Home, and want to be able to see it full of life once again. Obviously I can't relate, and I haven't looked into it myself. My memories of Home are largely of time spent people-watching, item collecting, drooling over all of the exclusive goodies I couldn't afford and poking my nose around into the dark corners of sometimes sparsely-populated polygonal playgrounds. Indeed, my loneliest moments in PlayStation's social spaces were probably my favorite ones, and gave me a certain affection for the intrinsic liminality of massively multiplayer game worlds "after hours". At any rate, I hope that those responsible for bringing Home home can resist any temptation to restore its more unfortunate aspects. Its thinly-veiled affections for the dollar bill keep it from being anything more than a simple footnote in history, for me.
Hey, what's that little icon I never noticed before?
It starts off the way many virtual social spaces do, with you being asked to create an avatar, dress it in some basic clothes and then being dropped into a cozy-if-bland apartment that you call home. After that, you're free to get out, explore and socialize. I gotta say - while I remember the character creator being surprisingly robust, at least with regards to face sculpting, I also remember it being damn near impossible to make a person that looked anything resembling "normal". Dark Souls' character creation comes to mind. Eventually I got tired of messing around with it and settled on an avatar that might have looked a little like me... If you stretched me out on a taffy puller, hit me over the head with a mallet and then forced me to cut my own hair. Never in all my time with Home was I ever really happy about my character's face, but much like in real life, you don't have to worry about it anymore after you find some stylish masks or helmets to cover all of that up.
Once you're out on the town, you would find there was a surprising degree of interactivity and verisimilitude to the various locales in Home, at least insofar as everything feeling like it was purpose-built. There was one big main plaza connecting to a number of other "core" experiences. The two main gathering points I remember were the bowling alley and the arcade. The bowling alley had plenty of seating for people who wanted to sit down and converse, and yes, you could actually bowl. It was as simple a bowling minigame as they come, but you could just walk up with a couple of friends or even complete strangers and start playing. It was also probably realistic to a fault, because if all the lanes were taken you had to wait your turn to play. The arcade naturally had a few playable games of its own where you could go for high-scores and prizes. There were even some cabinets that gave you the option to play games you owned "in" Home (really just serving as alternate launching point for said games). In either place, players would naturally congregate and commingle, and the hustle and bustle combined with the activity happening in the background made things feel surprisingly alive despite the sometimes uncannily quiet and static avatars populating it. There were more connectors to similar locations, as well as areas specifically dedicated to bridge into the various promotional "Spaces", but more on those later. I really need to talk about the Mall.
The Mall was exactly what you would expect: A huge, multi-layered shopping center where you could browse shops and pick out goods to complement your new digital lifestyle. Traversing the stairs and walkways, you'd see that each store had its own unique signage and even displayed their wares on stands and mannequins. There were your basic Sony-provided vendors, as well as stores offering in-game items based on the hot PS3 titles of the time. There were even some "designer" outlets that sold virtual goods specifically created for Home, some of which were based on real-world brands. And no, these goods weren't just limited to clothing or accessories for your avatar. You could also purchase furnishings for your apartment or even brand new "Personal Spaces" for Home. The Personal Spaces deserve special note, because while they were just additional spaces for you to decorate and mingle in, they often came with their own minigames and even unique items that you could obtain. Of course, when I say purchase, I don't mean with some kind of in-game currency. This game is free-to-play. They have to make money somehow! So if you want to take anything with you, you're going to need to bust out that physical, tangible wallet of yours. Given this was in a time where "optional purchases" were becoming more and more commonplace, it may not have been as shocking as you might initially assume. Then you look at the sticker prices. Even the most extreme examples of microtransactions in the console market at the time would run you a few dollars for some petty in-game content that would make you feel good about yourself, which is the most common form of microtransaction today. In PlayStation Home, this was just about everything. Clothes? Money. Hairstyles? Money. Furniture? Money. Houses? Obviously money. Maybe even more than you initially anticipated! There was at least one mansion you could buy that would later be updated with purchasable extra floors. That's right: You could buy DLC for your DLC. At first you might not shake your head at too much of it, but when everything from shoes to seaside shacks cost anywhere from half a buck to fifteen dollars, all of this is going to add up super quick. It's actually hysterical looking back at it now, if only because it seems like Home was way ahead of its time in all of the wrong ways. A virtual platform where you can chill out with others decked out in designer fits, lounging in curated digital spaces that are littered with transient treasures you purchased with real cash. Does that sound eerily familiar? I know Sony was hardly the first to break out into this field, but they were the first I can think of to present it to such a wide audience and install base, especially one with such a significant amount of young users. I don't know how much Sony and its affiliates ultimately made off of Home, but I suspect that while it might not have been enough to justify a replacement after its eventual closure in 2015, it was probably more than enough to have made the whole endeavor worthwhile.
So yeah, it was a bit questionable in a few ways. But do you think I cared about any of that as a kid? Of course not! I cared about video games, mate, and Home knew that. That's why they were trying to sell me games while I was already playing games.
There was a good number of "Game Spaces" or "Developer Spaces" you could explore and they were bizarre. Most of them were effectively just promotions for various PS3 titles or the relevant developers/publishers. Obviously Sony had a few of their own, with spaces for LittleBigPlanet, inFamous and Uncharted just being a handful of examples. You also had companies like Capcom, Namco and even Nippon Ichi or IREM getting in on the action. The spaces themselves were usually either areas ripped straight from the games or more generic locations that were simply themed after the property in question. You could walk around, interact with things, get little promotional items for your character and their apartment, and see content direct from developers about what they were working on at the time (admittedly one of the cooler aspects of Home). Sometimes there would even be minigames that you could partake in, and you'd be rewarded with prizes if you performed well enough. Obviously, these spaces by and large just wanted to sell you stuff - I seem to recall some of them would even provide links directly to the games on the PlayStation Store, and there were the obligatory "gift shops" where you could spend real money on items - but it would be unfair to say that there wasn't some creativity evident in how they were implemented. I remember that the Resident Evil 5 space had the opening area of the game framed as a film set, implying the events transpiring were all just part of a movie. The SIREN Lounge had a minigame where you had to navigate a hospital avoiding Shibito, and other players could actually watch you try to escape. IREM in particular went way harder than they had any real reason to, with a whole festival square containing a bunch of stands where you could play simple carnival games and earn prizes and trinkets themed after titles like R-Type. Going to a new space always felt sort of like visiting a theme park and leaving with a bunch of souvenirs. In an ironic twist, these locations designed around marketing were some of the most generous in the whole of Home, allowing you to get an armload of items for free in a game with such a heavy focus on cash purchases.
There was definitely original content made for Home, though, aside from just the generic Sony-provided spaces. In particular, I remember spending a lot of time in the "Sodium Hub", which was a space that had an entire story and game tied into it. I don't recall all of the details, but it was a futuristic setting taking place on a far-off moon or something of the sort. There was an A.I. named VICKIE who would guide you through everything, and the hub was a bar connected to a number of other facilities. The main attraction was a game called "Salt Shooter" where you would pilot a hovertank and shoot at waves of targets. There was actually some depth to the game, with upgrades and progression - ooooooh! It really wasn't anything that special, but rankings were tracked across players which sort of made you want to try to get a good score. There were a few other diversions thrown in for good measure, too, like a game where you stomped on space scorpions. I dunno, either. Of course, if you wanted access to later parts of the minigames or perhaps the coveted "VIP lounge", you would have to drop a bit of money on some items. Still, I seem to remember thinking it was a cool hangout spot and probably one of the better places to kill time in Home. I'm given to understand there were a few more updates to it by the time Home was shut down for good, but I sadly never experienced those myself.
In hindsight, I'm not really sure what it is that drew me to Home. The fact that it was free-to-play was certainly a factor, but I'm not sure that I was really in the target audience otherwise. I wasn't exactly the most social teen, even in online spaces where I had the benefit of anonymity, and I didn't have a lot of disposable income to fritter and waste on virtual living spaces and doo-dads. Not to say that it stopped me from making purchases - a fair portion of birthday money definitely went towards some personal hangout spaces and fancy outfits for my character. "Hangout" spaces in name only, because I was almost always the only person actually in them. But they were... Mine? I suppose that's the only way I can justify it in my head. They felt exclusive and valuable, and I could decorate them any way I liked and just admire what I had created for myself, shelves and tables lined with all of the baubles and trophies I had collected during my time with Home. Perhaps it was a crossroads of my love for furnishing virtual homes in games like Animal Crossing and The Sims, my fascination with always-online multiplayer environments, and the fact that every item I acquired had a sort of "history" to it after my hours spent exploring. Home was a weird, hollow, and frankly kind of greedy experiment by Sony, but one that I happily partook in. I'm really glad I got that out of my system early, because I'm fearful of where I might otherwise be today in light of recent industry trends.
I'm obviously not the only person that harbors some nostalgia for it, though. There has been a concentrated effort by fans to revive the platform, and it seems they're making some real progress. Like any shared online space, plenty of players seem to have made some genuine connections throughout their experiences with Home, and want to be able to see it full of life once again. Obviously I can't relate, and I haven't looked into it myself. My memories of Home are largely of time spent people-watching, item collecting, drooling over all of the exclusive goodies I couldn't afford and poking my nose around into the dark corners of sometimes sparsely-populated polygonal playgrounds. Indeed, my loneliest moments in PlayStation's social spaces were probably my favorite ones, and gave me a certain affection for the intrinsic liminality of massively multiplayer game worlds "after hours". At any rate, I hope that those responsible for bringing Home home can resist any temptation to restore its more unfortunate aspects. Its thinly-veiled affections for the dollar bill keep it from being anything more than a simple footnote in history, for me.