Home Business Magazine: The Background
Home Business Magazine (HBM) had begun as a multimedia project from the team at Media Street (known as PlayStrum Productions at the time), a video game website that has steadily been expanding into all areas of video games since 2006. It wasn't until early 2009, however, that talks about creating a dedicated service for the PlayStation Home community began to surface.
Initially, HBM was to be called "Home Entertainment". The premise was to give the overall PlayStation community a form of entertainment through a YouTube video channel that covers many different aspects of PlayStation gaming. The theme was to be news-based, with a Home avatar playing the news anchor. We wanted to do things this way so that we could give gamers who aren't into Home a reason to try it out.
However, as PlayStrum expanded further in mid-Spring 2009, the idea became too broad and had no real direction. It wasn't until June 2009 that the final decision was made public for the idea of a magazine based solely around PlayStation Home would be launching very shortly. The pilot magazine was released in late July 2009 by the team at PlayStrum to positive reception and was quickly picked up online by the Home community through the Official PlayStation Forums (the July issue can still be downloaded via "The Vault" page). After the reviews by the community, many Home enthusiasts came forth and requested to work together with other Home enthusiasts to begin working on the next issue.
Early August marked the beginning of the new HBM Team, taking over the website that was once fully operated by the PlayStrum team. Soon after, the first issue under the new team was released to critical acclaim. They had found their niche and knew it was time to evolve what they had done so well. This led to a short hiatus in September that didn't end until December of the same year. A new set of main editors, photographers and journalists were on board and prepared to get back to business. What resulted was a new design, new issue format and the most read magazine issue in their history.
On January 5th 2010, the revamped and refocused HBM Team designed and launched the new issue labeled "Home Business Magazine: Home Invasion Edition". Previous issues had an average of over 2,000 individual readers in total, but it wasn't until the first day numbers that the Team really understood where their work has taken them. It was announced the next day that their first night was met with an additional 237 individual readers on top of their average, and gaining just over 200 new readers every hour since, making us (at the time) the second most-viewed PlayStation Home magazine on the internet.
Since that month in 2010, we've been working hard to perfect what needed to be worked on and have clearly not forgotten about our fanbase. We continue to go back to the drawing board frequently so that we make sure we keep up with everything and deliver a quality issue in the future.
Initially, HBM was to be called "Home Entertainment". The premise was to give the overall PlayStation community a form of entertainment through a YouTube video channel that covers many different aspects of PlayStation gaming. The theme was to be news-based, with a Home avatar playing the news anchor. We wanted to do things this way so that we could give gamers who aren't into Home a reason to try it out.
However, as PlayStrum expanded further in mid-Spring 2009, the idea became too broad and had no real direction. It wasn't until June 2009 that the final decision was made public for the idea of a magazine based solely around PlayStation Home would be launching very shortly. The pilot magazine was released in late July 2009 by the team at PlayStrum to positive reception and was quickly picked up online by the Home community through the Official PlayStation Forums (the July issue can still be downloaded via "The Vault" page). After the reviews by the community, many Home enthusiasts came forth and requested to work together with other Home enthusiasts to begin working on the next issue.
Early August marked the beginning of the new HBM Team, taking over the website that was once fully operated by the PlayStrum team. Soon after, the first issue under the new team was released to critical acclaim. They had found their niche and knew it was time to evolve what they had done so well. This led to a short hiatus in September that didn't end until December of the same year. A new set of main editors, photographers and journalists were on board and prepared to get back to business. What resulted was a new design, new issue format and the most read magazine issue in their history.
On January 5th 2010, the revamped and refocused HBM Team designed and launched the new issue labeled "Home Business Magazine: Home Invasion Edition". Previous issues had an average of over 2,000 individual readers in total, but it wasn't until the first day numbers that the Team really understood where their work has taken them. It was announced the next day that their first night was met with an additional 237 individual readers on top of their average, and gaining just over 200 new readers every hour since, making us (at the time) the second most-viewed PlayStation Home magazine on the internet.
Since that month in 2010, we've been working hard to perfect what needed to be worked on and have clearly not forgotten about our fanbase. We continue to go back to the drawing board frequently so that we make sure we keep up with everything and deliver a quality issue in the future.