60 million PSN accounts created to date, says Sony's Stringer
During the company's CES 2011 press conference this evening, Sony Corp. chairman/president/CEO and honest-to-goodness knight Sir Howard Stringer reported that, to date, there have been 60 million PlayStation Network accounts created. The news was dropped as Stringer spoke of the growing market for connected devices and Sony's place in it.
At last year's CES, it was Sony Computer Entertainment chief Kaz Hirai who revealed that, at the time, 38 million PSN accounts had been activated. This year's numbers stand in contrast to the latest user base figures for Microsoft's Xbox Live service, which as of this past November sat at 25 million users, half of which were paid subscribers. Though impressive on face value, it's worth nothing that Hirai just days ago confirmed that PSN is not yet profitable. The hardware maker hopes to change that in part through PlayStation Plus subscriptions, the number of which have been sold has yet to be disclosed.
Of course, Sony's latest figure also includes PSP users and PSN accounts created via the PlayStation website. As with delivery of these stats in the past, there's no saying whether or not Sony will go into more detail down the line about where most of the users came from and what they're doing.
