Sony's Home has weathered its fair share of insults since launch. But putting arguments over the service's usefulness aside for a moment, lets today look at some numbers.
Speaking with GameDaily, Sony's Peter Dille has revealed a few user statistics for the service. Did you know, for example, that the average user spends 55 minutes in Home per session? Or that, since launch late last year, there have been four million "users" (which, in any online service where they don't specify "active users" usually means the total number of registered accounts) in Home? You most certainly do now.
So what do those numbers mean for Sony? Bad news first: they either mean there are a lot of PS3 owners who don't connect to the internet, or there are a lot of PS3 owners who simply don't care about Home. Probably a good mix of both, because for a free service pitched as such an important part of the PlayStation Network, four million is a pretty low figure.
And the good news? Well, for those amongst the 4 million who still regularly use the service, an average of 55 minutes per session is surprisingly high. That's a lot of time spent seeing Sony ads and, hopefully, building a Home "community", even if it's not breaking down how much of that time is spent loading spaces, playing games or simply wandering around and chatting/grinding.
Interview: Peter Dille Says Publishers are 'Fired Up' for PlayStation [GameDaily]
UPDATE - Joey over at Virtual World news was kind of enough to let us know that Peter Dille's numbers are old. According to Jack Buser, SCEA's Director of PlayStation Home (who, really, should know), there are five million users, not four. A healthier figure! He also discloses that of that five, 2.2 million are from the US & Canada, suggesting the service is doing a little better in Europe and Japan than it is in North America.
He also confirms that five million is the number of people who have registered an account in Home, not the number of active users, a figure Sony is yet to disclose.