Why Doesn’t Sony Bring Home to the PS4? June 4, 2014

With E3 a week away, I decided to fire up my PS3 and give Playstation Home a look. Sony’s actually been really good over the past few years at offering exclusive content and spaces to celebrate E3 every year.  Sony may have recently added Trophies, but after a thorough search, I noticed Sony hasn’t activated any E3 2014 content on Home just yet but after spending so much time playing Sony’s newest console, it was surprising that I still have to use older equipment to access such an important piece of Sony’s Playstation Network.

I was one of the first Beta Testers for Playstation Home, and over the past few years I’ve seen it grown tremendously but even after reviewing the most recent version of the program, I’ve noticed it isn’t perfect.  Most of these issues are actually technical.  It reserves a lot of space in the PS3’s Hard Drive, and yet most of the game’s content is downloaded as its being accessed.  It has a large and diverse catalog of avatar clothing and accessories, and yet it takes forever to load each user’s appearance alongside all the other content it must load when entering a new area.  I’m seriously concerned that since the program has worked like this for quite a while now, users appearances are phased in like this because of hardware limitations.

The most logical solution to all of these technical problems with the game is to simply make it available on the Playstation 4.  Since the PS4 has a lot more memory to offer developers, it could be able to load all of the data Home streams whenever you enter a new area, and possibly could hold that data in memory for longer.  This could also decrease load times.  For more than a year, Playstation Home has been able to sync all of a player’s progress on their servers. So everything that a player unlocks remains consistent regardless of which console the player is using. This means Home could, in theory, be able to keep track of a player among multiple different platforms.

Home works on a very similar income structure as the free-to-play model, and because of that it benefits economically by having a wide user base.  The game is free to access to anyone with a Playstation 3, online access, and a Playstation Network account.  It makes money by selling premium content, like Home Spaces, avatar clothing, and other digital accessories.  Having it available on multiple platforms is the best way to ensure a wide user base, and it could attract more developers who use the free-to-play model to design premium Home exclusive content.

On a separate note, I am surprised Home hasn’t been released on the Playstation Vita either.  Why not offer Vita integration?  The developers were talking about PSP integration ever since the closed beta, although they never did anything with it.   The reason why was because Home used to have a virtual PSP as the framing device for manipulating Home’s menus, and you could personalize it quite a bit, which was something I appreciated.  During last year’s E3 promotion, Sony used a virtual Playstation Vita to assist players in completing the E3 quests.  It would have been great to actually have that information that was keeping track of my progress on my actual personal device, like a Vita or Playstation App compatible Smartphone/Tablet.  The Vita’s hardware is better than the PS3’s in a lot of ways, and it can already be used as a PS4 second screen.  I would love to be able to navigate all the in-game menus from a second device.

In short, bringing Home to the PS4 seems almost like a no brainer.  In fact, I’m shocked it wasn’t included with the Playstation 4 at launch.  However, the console has been out for a few months now, and I think the time is about right for Sony to make an announcement about their future plans for Home.  With the PS3’s lifespan starting to wind down, Sony should use this year’s E3 to announce their future plans for the Playstation 4.  Not only would this encourage people to buy their new console, but give early adopters a lot to be excited about.  Anyone want to place a bet to see if Home PS4 gets announced on June 9th?