Home is a sticky experience

Despite widespread scepticism concerning Sony’s virtual world Home, the service continues to track record user levels and is making a profit for the platform holder, PSN boss Peter Dille has confirmed.

We had the highest traffic in December since we launched with 10m users worldwide,” the exec told IGN. The average time people spend in Home is about 60 minutes. If you think about that, it’s a lot of time.

I know you can sit down and game for hours and time gets lost. But think about watching a TV for a half hour or how much time you might spend on a website – these are kind of bite-sized chunks of time. But to spend 60 minutes on Home is a pretty sticky experience.”

Furthermore, Sony is making money on every digital item it makes for Home.

We’ve got 30 partners working on different spaces and I think that’s all been really great,” Dille insisted. People are also spending money on Home.

We’ve got virtual items for sale. They’re profitable for us because they don’t cost a lot to produce, but they also become drivers for gaming content. So people walk around in Home and if they see someone wearing an artefact from Uncharted or God of War, they might ask ‘where’d you get that?’ and they might go back to that specific game space, learn more about it, become a fan of that game and then go buy the Blu-ray disc.”