New Home Survey Hints at New Features

It was just another day for me coming home from the overnight shift checking my emails.  You know, to see who loves me, what’s new in the entertainment biz, as well as those doctors who found a new way to help increase my…well, you know the rest.  But then I stumbled upon a new email from the good folks over at PlayStation.com with a new survey to take.  Low and behold it’s a survey on Home, a service in which I have mixed feelings about.  Many of you have probably received this by now, as Home has been available to the public for quite some time, and it’s most likely not taken on a random basis but has been sent out to whomever has a PSN account.

Nonetheless, it brings up an interesting question – one of which will probably never disappear from the Home community – what is to come of the service?  Even with the disbelievers out there, Home has grown into something interesting the past couple of years.  What started off to be a community that mostly took place in a white colored lounge has turned into a beginning of a virtual world.  Home is not without its flaws, its complaints, its boring parts, and its perversion – but credit is due when it’s earned – the support for Home is not declining but only increasing.  With the recent completion of Xi, a lot of hope has been placed upon the team developing Home to make the service bigger, better and hopefully cheaper.  More of this will be covered in a later article from me regarding how Xi has completely changed the face of Home for not just me, but a lot of other users as well.  Keep a look out for the article within the next week.

Onto the topic on hand; regarding this Home survey – well the basic intro questions were asked: how many times do you visit Home, what are you most familiar with, and what do you like or dislike about the service.  Then you get to the good stuff.  Everyone familiar with previous PlayStation surveys know that there are always questions asked that lead to potential.  Sometimes that potential leads to realism, other times it leads to nothing.  But with Home still in beta phase we like to think that the potential here should be taken a bit more serious.  The first series of questions regarding possible new features to Home deal with new items to purchase from the Mall.  Nothing exciting here, but there was one option that caught my attention: statues/figurines.  I’m intrigued to know what they mean by this.  I know there are currently small ornaments available that feature characters from Street Fighter IV, but are we talking lifesize (in-game) models here?  For instance, I have always wanted to get that life-size Helghast model that Guerrilla Games auctioned off after the first Killzone game came out but I wasn’t willing to shell out thousands of dollars for something I would never use.  But for a small price (or heck even free) I would love to decorate my deserted home space with a Helghast model.

A few questions later you get what some of us who have participated in Home have wanted from the beginning.  Keep in mind that some, if not most or all of these mentioned features were originally promised when Home was first revealed by now Atari personnel Phil Harrison. Click on the image below for features as well as this author’s opinion on them.

I cannot recall if game launching was ever a promise at Home’s unveiling, but it has become one of the more demanded features for all games considering Home is all about finding new friends and playing together.  A trophy viewing room was originally promised but has yet to be delivered.  While I try to emphasize in any review I do (whether it be a 360 or PS3 game) that achievements/trophies should be considered a bonus and not a reason to buy a game – it would be cool if we used trophies for more than just bragging rights.  While a trophy viewing room was unveiled, I would hope it would go beyond just viewing the trophies.  For instance, let’s say you unlock the Platinum trophy in Wipeout HD – while it would be a cool bragging right to say you unlocked it, why visit the home space to view it when you can simply do that from the Trophy menu on the XMB.  What I am thinking here is unlockables.  You unlock the Platinum trophy in Wipeout, upload it to your Home space and you should get a voucher to download an exclusive Wipeout item for your Home space, or at the very least a kickass racing uniform.  While it will probably be some gimmick of an unlockable, people are suckers for free stuff.  Plus it would be cool to earn free items after we spent money on the product.  While Wipeout is already reasonably priced at $20 on PSN (perhaps the most valued game at the premium price point) we will always want more in return.

If you also recall from when Home was first shown the promise of feature length films as well as showing off our own videos and pictures were there as well, and like the trophy room, both features have yet to surface.  Progress has been made in the effort of Home recently giving us the ability to show off our own photos from our hard drives in our home spaces (PlayStation.blog reveals).  While it is a start, it also forces users to go off and purchase virtual picture frames to show off their own photos.  While you can consider it a payment to add the feature, or in other words look at it as donating to the server upkeep, I look at it as cashing in.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand why we are charged for virtual items in Home, and while like most of you out there I would much rather see it free – it’s just not something we should expect in the modern gaming age.  I just wish we could see a different pricing model when it comes to the Mall is all.  While a $1 here and a $1 there may be OK, when everything is priced the little amounts can add up to a weeks paycheck if you don’t control your impulsive behavior.

Feature length films are a tough thing to deliver on, and I will be extremely surprised to see this idea come true.  There are a lot of licensing issues and fees when it comes to something of this matter.  There’s fees paid to the unions, fees paid to the studios, fees paid to the producers, region issues, parental issues, etc…I would love to be able to go the PlayStation Home theater and be able to view a movie like Paul Blart Mall Cop for a small free (maybe the price of a rental that the PlayStation Store charges), but there are certainly complications.  And obviously with the availability of movies in both standard and high definition in the PlayStation Store compiled with the growing age of services like Netflix and redbox (read my redbox article here) the addition of watching movies in the Home theater is sort of useless.

The Theater has aged with great strive though, even without the option of watching actual movies.  What started off as an 8 room cineplex playing the same movie trailer over and over again (remember Casino Royale?), turned into a 1 room place to view some interesting content.  We have been given sneak peeks into hit games like inFamous, been treated to a music video here and there (ex: Paramore’s video for the movie Twilight featuring the lovely Kristen Stewart), and even been treated to teases of movies (the first 8 minutes of the direct to video Resident Evil: Degeneration).  There is a reason to visit the Theater now, but it still looks to be the weakest link of Home.  I would love to see the possibility of posting user created videos.  Obviously if you let the users post it free-for-all the servers would crash with a lot of junk, but run the occasional contest.  For example, run a contest to see who can create the best animated short.  Take the top 5 the developers think are the best, treat the Home crowd to previews of each, have them vote and then show the best one in the Theater.  Fees and royalties are reduced significantly and the community becomes more invovled.  Call me an idealist, what can I say. Click the image below to view possibilities of the theater.

Sports certainly caught my eye, and I would love to know of what exactly they mean by it.  If they mean to televise actual sporting events, that would be awesome.  Granted it’s a one screen Theater, but what could we make of this?  Moving on, if one didn’t consider the Theater the weakest link to Home, Listen@home would certainly get my vote.  While we have been treated to a few good songs here and there, as well as being able to listen to the entire inFamous soundtrack – for the most part it’s been completely dull.  The survey gets into this feature a few times, but mostly asks what kind of genres would you prefer to listen to.  If you know the kind of music lover I am, I chose rock – and I question what they (meaning the survey conductors) consider rock.  When I think rock, I think AC/DC, Guns n Roses, Zeppelin, Foo Fighters, The Cult, etc…but today’s mainstream radio has a completely different perspective on what that genre is.  This is neither here or there, but for those interested, you can take a look at what I do listen to at my last.fm profile.

We finally reach features never mentioned before that certainly excite this author, and I hope others as well.  I have been a PlayStation fan since the very beginning and have a vast knowledge of its past, and won’t be afraid to admit I love reading about it.  Sony was the underdog back in the mid 90s when they announced they were going to enter the video game business.  At the time it was mostly Nintendo vs. Sega, but then Sony took the to the scene and began its dominance (though it certainly has lot its power in recent years, but could easily rebound).  I talk about this because one of the possible new features is a look back to the beginning of the PlayStation brand, its initial games and how it all began.  This could even lead to the possibility of playing PS1 games through Home, but that’s an idea that I generated from the survey rather than the survey openly mentioning it (and again, with PS1 games being sold through PSN, why would they allow people to play them for free).  Take a look at the image below (click to enlarge), what interests you?

If anything would excite me more it’s the mini-games.  I am a sucker for mini-games, and would love to see more added to PlayStation Home.  The reason I visit game spaces in the first place is to see what kind of mini-games are available.  If none are available (like Far Cry 2), I rarely go back and visit.  While I own the game, and the space offers a detailed map I can careless about the space unless it has something for me to do.  I’m mostly interested in the history perspective here.  I occasionally search YouTube for old videos with developers on how they created a certain game, and compare it to n0w-a-days.  Oh how technology has changed.

The survey concludes by asking you what you usually do on your PS3 in general.  How often you watch movies, visit the store, and most of all, how much time you game on the system.  It was pretty even for me, though everyones will probably differ.  If you complete the survey you get entered to win a PlayStation game of your choice, but I never won a prize like that, and I have taken almost every survey that is sent to me from PlayStation, though they reward me back by getting me into pretty much every beta available.

So there you have it, more possibilities of what is to become of Home.  I’ve been in Home since the very beginning, from the initial closed beta, to the limited beta, and of course now to the open beta.  I’ve seen it for two years now and let me tell you it has changed and changed drastically.  What was an empty, boring room has become a populated social fest that in a sense has delivered what it wanted to become – a social environment to meet, great, and hang.  It has its problems, it needs fixing, but comparing it to 2 years ago, it has certainly shown what it can do.

So what do you want in Home?  What possibilities shown in this article interest you – do you still want the trophy room?  Should Sony shell out royalty fees to deliver on feature length film?  Do user created photos interest you?  As I said previously, look out within the next week on another Home article regarding how Xi has changed the face of Home and what is to become of it (what is Xi you ask?).  I will take a deeper look into what needs fixing, what is working, and an overall judgment of Home at this point of time.  Until then, should we take this survey into any consideration of realism?  Are these ideas realistic, or is Sony just trying to see if we no longer want features originally shown?  Voice your opinion and below, and as always comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.

Also, if you wish to view the original videos regarding Home’s unveiling, click on either one of Phil Harrison’s photos below to view the Trophy Room (then called Hall of Fame) demonstration and the GDC Demo of Home.