Interview: The messy, doomed journey of PlayStation Home, as told by its architect

Sony has officially killed PlayStation Home. This is a revisit of an interview that took place back in December with its former architect.

Original interview below...

In September this year, Sony announced that PlayStation Home will soon ask its residents to vacate the premises before closing its doors for good. Ask around and plenty of PlayStation users will tell you it's high time, but it could well be argued that Home finally has the chance to become something meaningful. Since Facebook bought Oculus VR there's been speculation that the big blue social network is working on its own Metaverse-esque social space, something PlayStation Home could have been (aided by Project Morpheus) had it stuck around.

But after six years, Sony no longer sees Home as a viable project. Not only will the social platform never make its way onto the PS4 and PS Vita, PS3 users will become totally homeless on March 31, 2015.

Naturally, the reaction has been to give Home the stamp of failure, but PlayStation own former Home Architect Oscar Clark, who launched the service, doesn't agree. "It was a massive success that everyone thinks was a failure," he tells TechRadar at Bilbao's Fun and Serious game festival. "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."

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!" says Clark. "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, but there are fundamental design problems. For example there was no back button... you might have Home Square but if I went off somewhere else I was in an offshoot, I had to navigate back to the Home space.

"On most [browsers] you have a home button that sends you straight back. I couldn't, in character, walk up to a teleporter to take me back to Home Square. Which meant people went off into different avenues and got lost. People even had trouble getting out of the apartment in the early days. People didn't realise they could walk out of the door. There was a door with a sign saying walk this way. People couldn't walk out the door."

Unreal estate

But these problems were fixable. The real problem was that PlayStation Home wasn't actually home at all, and Sony was resistant to the idea of bringing it social platform to the fore of the console experience, which, Clark argues, is exactly where it needed to be.

"We were investing in the experience over time, but the one thing we would never get was the one thing that really mattered," he says. "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."

"The problem is, when you're the internal solution in a big games studio, none of the internal teams want to work with you. The LittleBigPlanet guys, I love them to bits, those guys were trying to do something similar. And if you think about it, the ability to have experiences that are social and connected - they were allowing created content, we weren't - but making a home space wasn't going to be a big value to them. But imagine what we had had a slightly different attitude. And actually the LittleBigPlanet [Home] space itself was brilliant, beautiful. It showed what you could do. Even in Home, you're wondering around in this beautiful space. But of course they decided to put up a picture wall, which was great. Guess what the first thing people did on the wall was… draw dicks. TTP was the acronym - time to penis."

The other problem with Home was fulfilling promises that the technology couldn't deliver, which meant it became an aspirational platform that would never reach the heights made to an excited GDC audience in 2007.

"When Phil Harrison stood up and said we were going to have trophy rooms... we couldnt have because, unless it was mandated, no one's going to make a 3D trophy for every trophy you got in a game," Clark tells us. "And the live TV sets were actually impossible at the time, we found a way to do it later - video texture on a screen - but it wasn't physically possible when it was announced. So the things we got chastised about constantly were a problem. And you need to start out with killer content like any platform. We started out with very little content."

Shopping and chopping

But wedding social networking and gaming has never been an easy task, with Nintendo's Miiverse an example of where it's perhaps been implemented a bit more assuredly - but even that still has a lot of limitations.

"I think Home was a brave experiment," says Clark. "Home was the first freemium console experience. There were massive lessons to learn… But they've been forgotten about, they've been ignored, they've been treated, in my opinion, as irrelevant. But if you look at what was there, what we did, how people spent money in the console space, the way people engaged in communities… you could completely revolutionise the way you approach consoles as a platform."

Home was a commercial success too, and saw 19 million active users at its peak. "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."

So what happens now? Morpheus has the potential to transition Home into something amazing, but if Sony is to build its own Metaverse, it'll be on something else. Clark is convinced that we'll one day look back at Home as an early indicator of where consoles are heading, and it's hard not to agree. "The stuff we learned about 3D navigation, architectural UI. I think about 3D spaces in architectural UI now. If you think about shopping centre design, the way they lay out shopping centres, it's all about the flow of movement. And that's kind of like UI. If I see action stuff over somewhere, I can select to go over to it."

"There's an incredibly loyal community in Home. And that idea of creating a space for people to express themselves on their console of choice, with vast amounts of easy to play free content is brilliant. But it will probably be 10 years before we see its like again."

April 01, 2015 at 06:30PM

Hugh Langley