Actually, PS Home
was a Getaway.
Sony London Studios initially developed it as a multiplayer mode around the time of Getaway 2. ( Black Monday toyed with having a guild-style pub where you'd meet players and join up for MP missions... oddly enough, they would have preceeded GTA Online in the PS2 era.) Phil Harrison supposedly took a shine to the MP project and it was reconcieved as a global gaming hub network for multiple PS game experiences (and eventually its own contained ecosystem; I'm not sure if the game launcher hubs and "battlemap planning sandbox" ideas of PS Home ever even took off?) Curiously, PlayStation Home never got a Picadilly Circus space to reuse that abandoned Getaway PS3 map, and although there was a London Pub space, it was a 3rd party add-on not made by London Studio.
For many PlayStation 3 owners, their relationship with Home has been brief. They fired up the virtual world platform ar…
www.eurogamer.net
And yeah, hopefully these console manufacturers are not giving up on their odder community-building ideas. (I remember how many friends I collected on PS Vita just linking our alarm clocks with Wake-up Club.) I guess GASSes like Fortnite are eating up the community time investment, and in some ways that's better since it's platform agnostic, but I still think these console makers can do something on the front end to help their boxes reach out to fellow players.
Hey that's pretty interesting history there. I appreciate the brief run-down and I'll have to give the Eurogamer article a read over the weekend!
Games like Fortnite are just going to be eating up more and more of that lunch as they are trying to become platforms unto themselves, and I'm actually curious how SIE, Microsoft, and even Nintendo deal with that going forward. There are some interesting possibilities, but my particular interest is more in what ways platform holders will try cementing control within their space while stuff like Fortnite continues to persist.
You mean externally-developed games? That's what they have always done.
I want to see this PS3 variety that was coming only from their internal studios.
Well yeah, SIE have always leaned into working with 3P on games as exclusives to their platform. But PS3 era saw a lot of their own internal studios providing plenty of variety in exclusives as well. I'll list some games and if they were done by a 3P studio as some 2P deal, feel free to correct me:
-Killzone 2
-Genji
-Calling All Cars
-Fat Princess
-Tourist Trophy (PS2 release but during early PS3 years)
-Folklore
-Uncharted
-LocoRoco
-Little Big Planet
-Little Big Planet 2
-SOCOM
-Resistance
-EchcoChrome
-Infamous
-Uncharted 2
..I admit that maybe I underestimated how many 3P devs SIE worked with in 2P deals back in the day, but I do feel they had more volume of those type of things going on vs today. Although they do have things like the China Hero Project, India Hero Project, Africa Hero Project etc. I just would've expected more of that type of stuff among known big 3P devs & pubs like Capcom, SEGA/Atlus, Bandai Namco etc.
Though they've just done something with Koei-Tecmo, have multiple things with Kojima Productions, and I guess Shift Up can probably be considered entering that type of rank now too. What I did appreciate about their older arrangements was the variety in scale of games from AAA to various AA alongside genre types. Like I doubt they'd be partnering with a 3P to make something like Boku no Natsuyasumi today, even if there could be space for that as a low-scale or mid-scale AA and probably also find a good audience on mobile alongside console.