Sony: "Home has been a huge success"

July 2nd, 2010, 23:49 Posted By: wraggster

PlayStation Home has been "a huge success" for Sony despite scepticism among press and consumers, the service's director Jack Buser has said.

"The proof is in the pudding," he told Gamasutra.

"With numbers like we have, it goes without saying that Home has been a huge success for our company, something that we have been very proud of."

Those numbers apparently include 14 million logins, although Buser hasn't revealed how many people play regularly - just that for those who do, 70-minute sessions are average and 85 per cent of them have played before.

It may be a huge success but there's no word on overall profitability either.

"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," Buser explained.

"We've released over 5000 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."

Buser also said that virtual items "is a very good business model for PlayStation" and "one of the highest-margin businesses in the games industry" - something the likes of Zynga would no doubt agree with.

As such Buser's focus has been on providing better value in Home's interactions with other games, rather than just drawing Nathan Drake on a hat and charging 10 quid for it every few weeks.

"It's this whole idea of expanding the world of your favourite games inside home," he said. "That's another big pillar of our strategy moving forward."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/so...a-huge-success

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