Well, it's now known what the virtual item sales are for Home. With all the Kotakus, IGNs, 1ups, and other gaming new sites out there, a tiny blog got them first. And they are SAD. A forewarning, these numbers don't include the income from advertising. This is only the sales from micro-transactions, and only for the USA.
Home rakes in on average $125k a week. That's right Home fanatics, it's not even breaking a million per month. Hence the reason it's quite possibly being canceled in the near future.
So who's to blame for all of this? Well first off there's Katherine De Leon, who is responsible for the virtual spaces in Home. So when the [all] spaces bugged out, she would be the one to blame. We reported prior to this that they had hired someone to "revamp" Home, and it turns out it was Katherine who did the hiring. She hired a woman by the name of Celia Pearce, who claims:
Celia Pearce is a game designer, author, researcher, teacher, curator and artist, specializing in multiplayer gaming and virtual worlds, independent, art, and alternative game genres, as well as games and gender. She began designing interactive attractions and exhibitions in 1983, and has held academic appointments since 1998. Her game designs include the award-winning virtual reality attraction Virtual Adventures (for Iwerks and Evans & Sutherland) and the Purple Moon Friendship Adventure Cards for Girls. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from SMARTLab Centre, then at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.Her website can be found here. Be warned, her website is an eyesore that challenges even the worst Geocities pages of the late 1990s. Higher than Katherine though is Jack Buser. Jack Buser (seen here doing his best impression of Animal from the Muppets) has failed to keep Home's development moving forward. While most successful companies and software projects excel due to the teamwork and combined efforts of everyone involved, Jack Buser had made every attempt possible to do the polar opposite. Every member of the team, if it be Katherine De Leon, Glasswalls, CydoniaX, Locust_Star, Buggie, or [insert name here] has had issues with Buser. According to sources he's a bit bipolar and has an extreme fear of failure. So chances are he's scared shitless at the moment because Home is doing really poorly.
It seems to us Buser's biggest mistake is placing his responsibility as the director for Home on the shoulders of the dingbat Celia Pearce and her idea of what Home could be. She spent months hanging out at malls and theme parks, taking pictures, and put all this together into some sort of grandmaster "redesign for Home." So there you have it...the future of Home is a giant mall/amusement park designed by a clueless, socially inept middle-aged lady who billed so much money to Sony for this "work" she bought a house with it. She then passed off this piece of shit to Katherine who passed it off to Jack, who decided to bank Home's entire strategy for the year on it. Now, normally strategic direction of a platform should come from the DIRECTOR, don't you think? But since Jack is so incompetent he dove on this thing like a fat kid on cake.
Most of the costs for Home development are in London, but there's also a ton of money paid out to 3rd parties who also build a lot of their virtual spaces and items. In fact, this is how most stuff is being created for Home this year, since Katherine De Leon has managed to hog most of the budget for her internal team of about 25 people to only work on the piece of shit Home redesign.
Some other interesting information, we have discovered Home does have its own QA team and they also use Sony's internal QA. Each region also has their own. Katherine, Jack, and the Home business manager talk to game developers to try to convince them to make stuff for Home. Jack answers to the Senior Director of PSN Marketing, Susan Panico.
So we have to ask: Susan Panico, what the fuck is going on? Why are you letting this crap go on? Isn't it time to cut and run?
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