Sony: Hardcore gamers use Home

In a recent interview withGiant Bomb, Sony's director of Home Jack Buser supports his passionate love for Home withsome staggering statistics on not only Home'shuge financial success, but also its shockingly large user base.

"You have users who are spending a tremendous amount of time on the platform, literally spending their lives inside of PlayStation Home," says Buser. Our kneejerk reaction, of course, is "Who are these people?!" Lucky for us, Buser seems to have some insight on the answer.

Above: All dressed up and nowhere to go

Buser begins with two big facts:

-PlayStation Network boasts a total of 77 million registered users, of which "over 20 million" participate in Home to some extent
-The average Home session lasts 70 minutes

He goes on to say that there are two primary types of Home users - people "spending their lives" on Home (yeesh, really?) and people who "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." So basically, they use Home when they have nothing better to do.

So who are these people? Giant Bomb had posited previouslythat Home usersare primarily people in the household where the PS3 exists but another member of the family is the primary gamer. Buser claims that the reality is actually the opposite - that the Home users represent the most hardcore sector of the gamer demographic.

"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."

Above: Looks fun

But really, these statistics still only indicatetrends amonghouseholds that own PS3s, so we're going to posit a new theory: the most avid Home users are single-console owners. It makes sense that if you only own one console, and it happens to be a PS3, that you'd dig deeper to use everything it has to offer. What Buser says about playing Home between games makes a lot of sense, and it makes sense that this would be more of an issue for people who didn't also have a 360 or a Wii to keep them occupied when they run out of PS3 games to play.

Buser goes on to talk about new strategies for incorporating more games into Home, as well as how successful the microtransaction business model has been for the service. To read the rest of Buser's shocking revelations, head toGiant Bomb.

(And PS - how many of you actually use Home? Anyone?)

Jul 1, 2011