To be fair, a service shouldn't take two chances to win people over, but Home's vision has taken a while to realise. In our opinion, it's finally got there. While we understand why the service might not be for everyone, it's definitely come on leaps and bounds. You can't possibly complain about the lack of things to do anymore, because, honestly, there's too much to do. If you're a newcomer, you couldn't possibly see everything Home has to offer in a weekend. Some of the content is good stuff too, like the excellent space-shooter Sodium One.
This has all prompted PlayStation Home's director, Jack Buser, to feel rather proud about his creation.
"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," he told Gamasutra. Indeed, the figures are impressive: Home has over 100 games, 50 unique spaces, 14 million users, and an average user session of 70 minutes. While we can't imagine those 14 million users are people visiting Home on a daily basis, the service always seems rammed whenever we drop by, so its clearly got a significant user-base.
"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 said. "We've released over 5,000 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."
He added: "In fact, I would say that it is a very good business model for PlayStation, and quite profitable, I might add. I like to say it's one of the highest-margin businesses in the games industry."
Having just recently got back into Home, we're quite impressed with the lengths the service has come. We definitely think it's worth giving another chance if you haven't visited for a while. If it's profitable, then that can only be good for the service's growth. We don't think it's going anywhere, and it'll be interesting to see how the lessons learned from this iteration of Home will inevitably play into the PlayStation 4 version.
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