PlayStation Home: By The Numbers

By Luke Plunkett

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The director of PlayStation Home, Sony's Peter Edward, has disclosed to Gamasutra a number of interesting facts about the platform/service, including the registered userbase, demographics and advertising statistics.

Registered Users: According to Edward, Home now has "7 million inhabitants", of which 3 million hail from Europe, and those "inhabitants" have downloaded 6 million "virtual items" between them.

Sounds good! Problem is, like Second Life (and, to be fair, most online titles), Sony don't count active users, they only count registered users. So if you logged into Home, walked around for 30 mins, hated it and never came back, you're still counted as an "inhabitant".

Which isn't the most useful statistic. For a better idea of how many people are actually using Home, we can look to some advertising figures...

Advertising Details: Edward revealed for the first time some details on the advertising within Home, in particular the success of two of the more prominent examples to be found so far within the service: the Red Bull air race, and the promotion for the Watchmen movie.

Edward says that the Red Bull game has logged 873,136 unique users, while the Watchmen promo tallied 812,544 unique users. With those two attractions being so prominent, and with those two numbers being so close, it looks like Home's active, regular users may well be closer to those figures than the "7 million" figure quoted.

Strange they don't quote that number. After all, if they could boast that Home had 1 million active users (which if it doesn't already have, they must be close), wouldn't that look, well, better?

Demographics: Finally, Edward says that Home's userbase skews mostly towards the "core" gamer, with the finding that a whopping 80% of Home's users are 18-35 year-old males.

So, next time someone presses you for Home stats, you'll have something to offer!

Sony's Edward Talks PlayStation Home As It Hits 7 Million Users [Gamasutra]

Users or no users, the figure 6m downloads ought to say something. Since the prices of most standard virtual products within Home range from 50 cents to 3 dollars. And special brand stuff from about 5-10 dollars. And "Vacation homes" around 20-30 i think.

6m dowloads of those products makes Home a success in Sonys eyes. And if you add that plus the reported 40min average spent in Home á user á 800.000 - 7.000.000 users = the adds and trailers posted within home gets alot of attention.

I like when good games gets good attention and good sales.

Edit :

Hey is Home still a beta??

^Technically, yes it's still in Beta.

That's why when M$ says it has 20 million XBL users...that's money in the BANK!

axumblade said: Remember this when you see 6 "women" grinding on some guy in front of the listening@home station.

She said she loved me!!!

Lol. I never even logged on into this because I have pretty much zero interest in it.