Some are ”literally spending their lives” in Home while others visit ”between games” for something to do. They’re ”rabid consumers” of media and games.
There are over 77 million registered PlayStation Network accounts and PlayStation Home has around 20 million of that. As it’s a free service it ”allows users to have very few barriers to themselves and actually coming into Home,” said Jack Buser.
”You have different kinds of users. You have users who are spending a tremendous amount of time on the platform, literally spending their lives inside of PlayStation Home. You have other users that are using PlayStation Home as something that they do between games.”
”They’ll have a big game they bought, they beat the game or otherwise get tired of the game, so what do they do with their console between that and the next time they buy a game? They use PlayStation Home,” he continued.
Those that bother to really invest in Home are in fact the biggest spenders of Sony software and services like videogames, movie streaming and more. ”If you look at the average Home user, they are the most hardcore gamer on the PS3,” he said.
”They buy more games than the average PS3 user, they play more games than the average PS3 user. They also watch more movies than the average PS3 user, who is already a highly self-selective consumer. We’re talking about rabid consumers of media and hardcore gamers. That’s who these people are.”
When the service first launched there was very little to do other than buy some clothing for your avatar and sit around the virtual space. People left in droves but over time it’s grown in content and started offering fun activities and competitions.
”We would be remiss to ignore the people on PlayStation who may have come in 2008 and walked into Home and said ‘yeah, there’s nothing here and left’ and formed their opinion,” said Buser. Sony want to entice back those who left unimpressed back at launch.
”We would love to see those people come back in. But I get it. If you come into a platform and there’s nothing there for you, you’re going to be hesitant to come back.”
”That’s why we’re very focused on this idea of games, because if it’s a great game, why not come back in and play it?”
”We made one fatal mistake in those early days,” said Buser. ”You put a bunch of gamers together in a room and you tell them to talk to one another and they don’t do it. This is the 20/20 hindsight part. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t obvious back in 2008.”
”We thought ‘here, we’ll build these rooms and we’ll fill them with gamers and we’ll theme these rooms after games and then people will self-select and talk to each other.’ What we discovered very early on, even in closed beta…we realized that gamers talk to each other and they meet each other in the context of playing games.”
Do you use PlayStation Home, videogamer?
