Playstation Home Getting New Freemium Titles

Sony has announced a planned rollout of one of the “deepest and most immersive” genre based freemium games to hit Playstation Home. Releasing now through the Spring months and into Summer, these new offerings will help showcase the ability for PS Home’s developers to create experiences on the platform that are unmatched in the social games space using the latest development tools available, most notably with the post-apocalyptic shooter No Man’s Land, created by UK-based development house VEEMEE. The titles will be released starting today, and include:

Cutthroats: Battle for Black Powder Cove: Offering the biggest multiplayer experience in PS Home thus far, Cutthroats: Battle for Black Powder Cove allows up to 24 gamers to battle aboard pirate ships as both ship captains and gunners, attempting to take down their opponents’ ships. Utilizing a freemium game model, Cutthroats: Battle for Black Powder Cove is completely free-to-play, though users wishing to expand their ship’s offenses can purchase coins to use for upgrades. (Release Date: March 28)

No Man’s Land: Players utilize a grid interface to sprint from cover to cover, popping up to take out opponents at every turn. The game offers a traditional “Team Deathmatch” mode, as well as a cooperative mode where salvage must be delivered back to the team’s depots, while fighting to stay alive in the process. (Release Date: Spring 2012)

Mercia: Developed by Lockwood Publishing, PS Home’s first multiplayer role-playing title transports players into a fantasy world of treacherous dungeons, magic spells, and a plethora of weapons and enemies. Mercia invites players to traverse a number of enemy-filled dungeons, and for the first time in PS Home’s history, the game continually streams new content, leading to zero load times while playing. Mercia also utilizes a number of RPG mainstays such as crafting, upgrading, and resource management, giving gamers the deepest RPG experience available on the platform. (Release Date: Summer 2012)

“These new titles are delivering on the promise we made to the PlayStation Home community when we first launched the new core experience in November of last year, offering a variety of genre-based games to suit every gamer’s preference,” said Chris Mahoney, Senior Business Manager of PlayStation Home, SCEA. “We’re bringing gamers the kind of experiences they expect from these genres with the social elements that are only available through PlayStation Home.”

PlayStation Home itself launched as a free virtual world for PS3 owners, letting players build out a customizable apartment, chat with friends, and wander shared public spaces long before this wave of genre-based games arrived. That “new core experience” referenced in Sony’s announcement was a significant overhaul of Home’s central hub, rolled out a few months earlier, and this rollout of shooter, pirate-combat and RPG titles was part of the push to fill that redesigned space with more substantial content than the fashion and social features Home had leaned on previously.

The freemium approach behind titles like Cutthroats and No Man’s Land reflects a broader shift happening in gaming around this time, as free-to-play models built around optional microtransactions were becoming increasingly common on consoles rather than staying confined to browser and mobile games. Letting a large multiplayer battle like Cutthroats be played entirely for free, while offering purely optional coin purchases for players who want to upgrade their ship faster, was a way for PS Home’s outside developers to reach as wide an audience as possible without a paywall blocking entry. Sony would go on to operate PlayStation Home for several more years after this announcement before eventually retiring the service in 2015, but the model behind these titles — pulling outside studios in to build free, socially-driven experiences inside Home rather than relying solely on first-party content — remained a consistent part of its approach in the years that followed.