A Homeowner Is You

Some games offer you the option to buy a house. This may act as a free Inn, give you a place to store stuff, or just be a Bragging Rights Reward. It rarely has a major impact on the gameplay, but may be a big pull for certain types of players, depending on the level of An Interior Designer Is You.

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Examples of A Homeowner Is You include:

In Pokémon Platinum, a random person gives you a Villa in the Resort Area for free. Other powerful trainers will visit you there, but it's really just something to spend your cash on.
Most of the Aveyond games feature the Trauma Inn–type house. They also allow you to speak to your teammates.
Final Fantasy VII has one which serves as a free inn, but as there's already one of those aboard the Highwind, it's really just for the bragging rights.
Terranigma allows you to buy an apartment if you max out a certain city's development. You can even buy furnishings, a bed for resting and a save point to put in it!
Fable. You can then rent them out.
The Sims, of course, but you're pretty much required to have a house.
- Not necessarily; you can move a family into an empty lot and have them live there without building walls. It's not recommended, unless you like that sort of thing, but nothing in the Sims says a lot has to have a house on it.
You're required to buy a house in Animal Crossing... and you spend most of the game expanding it and paying off your debt.
The Elder Scrolls games let you buy various houses. Their usefulness varies - in Morrowind you get free stuff when you build a stronghold, but you have to buy the furnishings for your houses in Oblivion.
You can purchase a NeoHome in Neopets, and decorate it to your heart's content.
Baldur's Gate II had "stronghold quests" for each PC class, with rewards ranging from a castle for Fighters and the Planar Sphere for Mages to a bunk in The Order of the Radiant Heart HQ for paladins.
In Dragon Age: Origins, if you cleaned the DLC-only location Soldier's Peak of Darkspawn infestation, it would serve as your nominal home. You couldn't actually live there, but it had two local merchants and, more importantly, the only container usable for storing your own items in the entire game.
- In Dragon Age II, you get two houses: In Act I, you and your family are living with your uncle in his small home in Lowtown. There is a storage chest there, and you can always find your mother, uncle, brother/ sister, and possibly dog there to converse with them, and can read letters sent to you, mostly to start sidequests. By Act II, you've moved up in the world, and purchased the old family manor in Hightown. It has all the same features as Gamlen's shack, except its bigger, Gamlen doesn't live there, you can potentially ask your Love Interest to move in with you, and your sibling can no longer be found there.
- In the Awakening expansion, you get Vigil's Keep as your home: it lets you swap party members in and out like the Party Camp did in Origins and has a storage container like Soldier's Peak.
In EarthBound you can eventually afford to buy a small house just west of your hometown. The guy you buy it from neglects to mention that it's missing a wall, but it contains a photo location and a silly magazine excerpt so it's totally worth it.
You start out in a modest cave in Elona and eventually have the option of buying bigger and better real estate.
In Phantasy Star II, your home is where new party members come to call and where you can swap them out.
- In Phantasy Star IV, you can stay at your home in Aiedo for free instead of staying at an inn—it becomes a bit of a Tear Jerker when you return to it after Alys is killed, and all her things are still there. You can also display the ridiculous souvenir crap you can buy at a tourist trap in the first half of the game.
In Fallout 3 the Lone Wanderer can get one of two homes depending on the outcome of the "Power of the Atom" quest. The player can buy several preset decoration schemes for either dwelling and store other useful, valuable, or decorative items there. Both contain beds and can be stocked with additional useful furniture.
- Fallout: New Vegas has several house options for the PC, but the most developed of these is the Presidential Suite from the Lucky 38 casino, which you get for merely advancing the main quest. This is where you companions hang out when they're not with you (if you don't send them back to where you met them), and you can pay caps to get some useful furniture items, like a crafting bench. Other examples of nominal player housing are the suites you can get at each of the Casinos for making enough money there, the safehouses you can get for aiding major factions, and the Hotel room in Novac you can buy.
In Ultima Online, one of the first commercially successful MMORPGs, a player with enough gold could buy a deed to a house and then place it almost anywhere in the game world. This led to the online equivalent of a housing bubble as available land was quickly claimed, and newer players could only buy an existing house or hope for a negligent player to allow their home to fall into collapse (thus freeing up some of the limited landscape). In the late Nineties UO properties could be found on eBay for hundreds of US dollars. The advantages of housing in UO included item storage, easy access to item crafting (forges, looms, etc.), a safe place to practice skills (given the early PVP everywhere environment), and prestige. Given this was one of the first online examples of home ownership and the developers did not fully anticipate human nature, the disadvantages included burglary, home invasion, stalking, etc. But those were the good old days.
Good god, Minecraft. You punch trees, make sticks, make picks, mine stone, and build the greatest Crowning House of Awesome you've ever built.
Terraria, too. It may be 2D, but it's pretty fucking similar to Minecraft. You have so many items to pick from when customizing your home, and, like Minecraft, you build it from scratch, so it truly is your home.
The later Grand Theft Auto games would have these as save points. Notably, in GTA: San Andreas, these also stock your wardrobe. Changing just one part of your outfit erases your wanted level. Think about it.
- Also, buy a piece of clothing once and you can access it from every safehouse in the state.
RuneScape has a Construction skill that allows you to build and customise a house, starting from a little one-room shack and potentially becoming a huge castle with a dungeon other players can explore.
Dragon Quest X lets you build a house which can then be customized.
Fortnite is like Minecraft but with more RPG-style combat, as you an your team build your strongholds, seige engines, traps, and fortifications. This is taken further in Fortnite Creative, where players have complete freedom and total access to the environment of the game to create anything they can envision. A commercial for Fornite Lego even has "Anyway You Want It" as the score.