PlayStation Home is one of the biggest enigmas in the gaming industry, being the only online virtual world on consoles. While its appeal eludes some gamers, PlayStation Home director Jack Buser thinks that unfamiliarity breeds this skeptical attitude.
“Home is new. We’re doing a lot of really new stuff that I think the industry is still wrapping its head around. We’re seeing a lot of innovation in the space, and some of us have hit success,” said Buser. “And I think it takes some time as the industry as a whole, whether that be consumers or whether that be the media, to start to shift their focus to these new types of platforms and see how people are actually spending their time with the console and with gaming in general. I think we are part of that evolution, part of that conversation.”
” . . . The proof is in the pudding,” Buser concluded. “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.”
Buser says there are over 100 games on Home, that the average user session is 70 minutes, that there are over 50 virtual Home spaces, and 14 million users have downloaded the client. Still, sales and profit numbers aren’t a matter of public consumption.
“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.”
“In fact, I would say that it is a very good business model for PlayStation, and quite profitable, I might add,” added Buser. “I like to say it’s one of the highest-margin businesses in the games industry. “I think today the idea of virtual items transactions is becoming par for the course for a lot of gamers,” said Buser. They’re understanding that through micropayments, they can gain social context and social capital, or they can through gameplay context, upgrade their gameplay experience through microtransactions. And that’s just becoming part of gaming.”
Going forward, what Sony is looking to do is “Total Game Integration” with playing games like SOCOM, Red Dead Redemption and BioShock unlocking items in Home. “We’ll also see games build out extensions to narrative, such as what you saw in BioShock 2,” he said. “It’s this whole idea of expanding the world of your favorite games inside home. That’s another big pillar of our strategy moving forward.”
Source: Gamasutra
