“Metaverse” = 2008 Playstation Home/en

I’m going to talk about the most complete and most entertaining virtual world “game” and the end of it. First of all, let me talk about why I decided to write this article, today the concept of “Metaverse” has started to take place a lot and with it, many virtual world games have started to appear, and these virtual world games are introduced as a new invention that will change the world, although it is an innovation. This post will be a tribute to an old “friend” and explaining to you why games made today can’t come close to a game released in 2008 (my hope is that a better game will be released than “Playstation Home”).

What is “Playstation Home”?

For now, since you cannot experience the game yourself and you can only watch low quality videos, let me explain the game to you simply.

One of the best games that reflects the real world and deals with the concept of life is arguably the life simulation game “Sims”, and Playstation Home can be defined as the online version of Sims. You design your own character in the game, create your own house and spend time with your other online friends in a wide variety of areas.

Character creation scene

Why is Playstation Home such a good game?

Because it contains everything that should be found in a virtual world game and they have included all of these elements in the game in the best way. If you ask anyone in the gaming industry what items should be found in a perfect virtual world game, it will count all the items found in this game. But the important thing here is not the idea, what is important here is the implementation and execution of this work and its implementation in the best way, and here “Playstation Home” has accomplished the most difficult part of the work in those years.

Some features in the game:

1. It’s free and easy to access on the Playstation platform, so there was a huge player base (you could meet almost all your Playstation friends here).
2. With lots of places to spend time and regular updates, new ones were added all the time.
3. Mini-games that you can play in locations and most of these minigames were in the game as a crossover of other games. One of the examples is “Uncharted 2”, there were special areas and costumes just for this game, and you could win prizes for both games.
4. You could attend live online-events with your friends and have a good time, for example: E3.
5. Thanks to the cooperation with many brands, clothes etc. there was diversity, for example: Diesel, Billabong etc.

There are points that most virtual world developers are working on and there are some who partially succeeded in these, but the biggest advantage of “Playstation Home” is that it is from Playstation. Through this platform, they had access to a lot of collaborations and brands, and they had a lot of resources and talented teams to use for the execution. If you’re wondering what else “Playstation Home” had to offer at the time, I recommend the Wikipedia page where most of it is written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Home

“Billabong” brand in the mall; “Uncharted 3” Mini-game; “E3” event

Why did it end?

in 2015, Playstation shut down the servers of this game and stopped developing the game, while the factor that caused it, is considered to be its marketing, in those years such a project was a project beyond time, and people didn’t really know what to do with such a game, and it wasn’t known much except for the Playstation audience (except for a certain group). But this audience was not enough to keep this game alive, no matter how many good aspects we mentioned at the top, there were some major application errors, bugs, server problems, etc. but it seemed inevitable because this game was a game beyond time.

Summary

The game was a very nice and high-quality game, but the timing seemed to be wrong, this project could have been a successful game if it had been released today by today’s standards. Why do I think like that, because at the time the biggest problem was marketing and its audience, but today people have more information about it and are more interested in such games.

For ”Metaverse” enthusiasts, this game was the closest to the concept of “Metaverse” thanks to the power of Playstation, and I’m sure that if it had continued, it could have been the real beginning of the Metaverse today. A world could be formed with all brands, games, social media and many integrations in one place.

I would like to share a little thought based on this game. If the makers of Sims game merged with Playstation and the makers of Sims would work on the virtual life part and Playstation works on the integrations and uses the experience which they got from Playstation Home, it is certain that an excellent game would emerge again. Even possible is a structure in which we can switch to all games and use social media platforms if they cooperate with Steam, Xbox, Meta, etc.

It was a game that I really enjoyed playing, and one of the reasons I wrote the article is that I wanted a game like this to be released again. I am sure that if Playstation or another brand re-releases the advanced version of this game, it will bring great curiosity. If I look at it realistically, it seems that the execution and success of such a project is again in the hands of large gaming companies, due to their powerful resources and cooperation opportunities.

“Be a good person.”