Sony Exec: PlayStation Home Is Good Mmmmk?

While I personally thought PlayStation Home was boring, Home director Jack Buser says the numbers prove me wrong. I’m glad we got that cleared up.

According to Buser, the numbers for Home are very satisfactory indeed.

  • Over 100 games on the service
  • Average user session over 1 hour
  • Over 50 unique spaces
  • 14 million people have tried Home

The latter sounds impressive, but as Joystiq questions, how many of those 14 million people regularly use the service? I’m one of those 14 million people because I popped in once or twice, but I immediately popped the hell out. And how many of the games and spaces are being interacted with? People are obviously doing something for that hour. Making a sandwich in the kitchen, maybe? Still, Home seems to making Sony money.

“We haven’t talked too much about the platform itself, but what we have said is that every mature virtual item we have ever created has been profitable. We’ve released over 5,000 virtual items on the platform, and we know that once those items reach maturity, they are profitable. So you see us creating a tremendous amount of virtual items, because it is such a high margin business for us to be in.”

This is news to me, as I thought the scuttlebutt was that Home was a failure. I’ve certainly gotten negative reactions from everyone I’ve talked to about it. But if enough people are enjoying it to make it worthwhile, than more virtual power to them. Just stay in PlayStation Home and out of Dylan home.

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  • Jim Jimmers

    I think people expect too much from home. It’s more or less, a playground for avatars, a place to meet gamers as such. I think the people who claim home a failure are the ones who expected it to pretty much replace the XMB as their hub for getting into any game, communicating with friends and the like.

    I don’t use home a lot, but when I do it’s an enjoyable experience.

  • http://www.ripten.com Chad Lakkis

    I would agree with you 100% had it not been marketed and hyped up to be more than that pre-release. They at one point (they being Sony) said it would allow you to watch full movies in a virtual theater. That eventually became trailers. And the fact that very few things in your virtual living space are free makes it seem like a desperate attempt to squeeze pennies from something that — as you said, should just be a simple avatar playground. I can get more customization for my free Yahoo avatar and that shouldn’t be the case.

    Thanks for the comment.