PlayStation Home was a “Success” According to Creator

PlayStation Home first found its way onto the PlayStation 3 in 2008 in open beta form. Now, 6 years later, it was announced that PlayStation Home would be shut down in early 2015. Yet, despite the fact that PlayStation Home is going off line, creator Oscar Clark feels that it was an incredible success.

In an interview with TechRader, Clark had this to say: “It was a massive success that everyone thinks was a failure. 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.”

Clark goes on about the success of PlayStation Home: “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.”

At the end of the interview, Clark speaks about the possibility of us seeing something like PlayStation Home: “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.” PlayStation Home will shut down on March 31, 2015.