For the past year, I’ve been having a grand time playing around with Playstation Home. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a fairly new feature on the Playstation Network. It’s an entire virtual community, almost like Second Life or the Sims, but made entirely for gamers. Indeed, when you pull up the Playstation Home icon on your PS3’s XMB, it says:

“Play games and meet friends in Playstation Home, the definitive social gaming network only on Playstation 3.”

    A social gaming network. It is, for the most part. I’ve had great fun over the past year, signing into Home, creating my own avatar, furnishing my own private virtual apartments, wandering around the different spaces that make up its virtual world, meeting new people who enjoy most of the same games I do.

    But as Home has progressed and grown over the past year, it always felt like something was missing. For the most part I tried not to concentrate on that hunch, instead trying to focus on all that was right with Home.

    These past few months, though, several things fell apart within Home, forcing me to confront that hunch and its implications. Events were carried out poorly, glitches were never addressed, purchased items were broken and never fixed, and so on.

    During this same time frame, they also hosted several contests, all of which fell apart. For instance, they hosted two separate scavenger hunts, wherein you had to explore Home during a certain period of time to find different segments of a 12-digit code that would unlock a free game for the first 50 people to enter the code. Yet somehow, during both contests, someone managed to find out the code before it was released during the course of the contest, and everyone who participated fairly ended up getting absolutely nothing. in both instances, Home’s management hasn’t even acknowledged the problem, let alone apologized for the hundreds of people who wasted so many hours of their precious time on a rigged contest.

    Naturally, like most online communities, Home held special events for the holidays. Those quickly fell apart too. Glitch after glitch occurred, most never getting addressed. It seemed like the rate of failures within Home was increasing over the winter months, but even worse than that, management was disappearing at an even faster rate. They were nowhere to be found. They might crop up on Home’s forum – the one place the Home community has to communicate with management – but only to respond to the most ridiculous of posts from the most offensive of users. Would they bother to respond to valid concerns, reports of serious glitches, or anyone earnestly trying to suggest solutions to these myriad problems? Nope.

    Well, unless you happen to be one of their friends or fans. But that’s another story all together.

    The reason I’m blogging about this is that over the past several days, all of this has culminated in a bit of a shocking turn of events. I posted an extensive essay on the forum, highlighting my concerns about the direction Home seems to be taking. It seemed to me that Home’s management was forgetting that Home was, at its core, a social network. The soul of any social network has to be involvement with the community that uses it. The user has to be engaged, involved in the core network, otherwise they’re reduced to being a mere consumer. The average customer has evolved beyond that these days; we’re no longer happy merely consuming what major companies have to give us, we want to be involved in its development and evolution.

    The essay I wrote included a suggestion that could possibly improve the situation. A vigorous, intelligent, rational debate ensued. Did a member of the Home management team respond? Yes, but not to any of us. No, they chose to give a flippant response to one of the few participants who clearly had the most misconceptions about Home and some of the most ridiculous of complaints.

    Social networks simply can’t flourish if engagement doesn’t happen. Or even just basic interaction between management and community. They are treating us like mere consumers, who should be happy with anything they decide to hand us. Yet they can’t seem to grasp that the demographic they’re targeting has evolved beyond that. They told us we were getting a social network, which implies a certain degree of engagement, involvement, and interaction. Yet we are getting none of that. And still they wonder why we aren’t happy.

    I’m afraid Home will fall apart if they can’t understand this very basic principle of how their customers have evolved beyond being simple consumers. Nowhere is that evolution of the customer more apparent than in social networks, with examples such as Facebook with its apps, Second Life with its immensely customizable universe, and so on. Home calls itself a social network, and yet it’s lacking even the most basic level of community involvement. There’s no way to get involved in Home, no way to engage with it beyond merely using the games they’ve already provided us with. As if that weren’t bad enough, there also seems to be an ever decreasing degree of communication between management and community. We’ve been given the official Playstation Home forum, where we’re continually directed by customer service if we ever encounter a problem, and yet trying to get management to talk to us is like trying to pull teeth – it’s painful, it’s a drawn out process, and we hardly ever get any positive results.

    I’m really worried that there’s more going on behind the scenes at Home North America than any of us Home users realize. Perhaps we’ve tapped into a sore spot we aren’t aware of, a bit of office politics raging behind the scenes at Home headquarters. As unfortunate as that would be, it doesn’t excuse the way they’ve been treating their customers. Sadly, despite the community’s attempts to try and be productive, to try to find some way to help the managers so that we can repair these broken lines of communication, things only continue to fall apart. This afternoon I discovered that a whole host of our comments, complaints, concerns, and suggestions have been deleted from the forum. I’ve just now been threatened with a ban if I don’t shut up, play nice, and pretend like everything’s all hunky-dory fine.

    And yet all I can think is, does Sony really think that they can get away with treating their customers this way?

    I, for one, am not going to tolerate being bullied. Yes, Home may be a free service, but I’ve invested a great deal of money in this project by buying clothing for my avatar, furniture for my personal spaces, new apartments, games, all manner of things inside the Home universe. Not because I needed to, but because I believed in Home’s potential and I wanted to be involved. Yet all the thanks I get for my support and enthusiasm for their product are silence, attempts to shut me up whenever I say something inconvenient, and outright threats.

    Tell me, Sony, how long do you think you can mistreat your customers before your lovely little virtual world suddenly finds itself devoid of any inhabitants? Remember, we are your customers, and the customer is always right.

    They can attempt to scare me into complacency. They can delete my posts. They can ban me. But I’m not going to tolerate it. I’m not going to sit by and let them treat me or anyone else this way. Let them try, but believe me, the world will hear about it if they do. This isn’t just about Home anymore, this is about what’s right, what’s fair, and the most basic of all business principles: how a company treats its customers.