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PSN sales up last quarter, PS Plus membership nearly doubled during E3 week
PlayStation Network has been hitting its stride over the last three months, posting its highest "transactional sales" quarter yet in its six years of existence. In layman's terms that means more people purchased content directly through PSN from April through June of this year than ever before in the service's history.Jack Buser, Senior Director of PlayStation digital platforms at SCEA, told Joystiq this all started back at E3 with the announcement of the Instant Game Collection, and that "membership sales in PS Plus almost doubled" during the week of E3. Since the launch of the Instant Game Collection, five games have managed to dominate in total downloads: inFamous 2, LittleBigPlanet 2, Just Cause 2, Ratchet & Clank All 4 One and Gotham City Imposters. Buser couldn't dive into what he called "the nuts and bolts" of PSN's performance (see: specific numbers) but did assure me the service is growing and becoming a more integral facet of Sony's approach. He also talked at length about PSN Day 1 Digital, which we'll have for you in a separate piece available later.
PlayStation Plus 'amplified' with more games, all other offers remain in place
During Sony's E3 2012 press conference, Jack Tretton announced the addition of a bunch of new games to PlayStation Plus as part of an "amplified" PS Plus relaunch. However, it wasn't clear exactly how the service was changing, beyond the offer of LittleBigPlanet 2 et al. the next day. Is PS Plus all about new full-size games every month for members?We asked Jack Buser, Senior Director of PlayStation Digital Platforms, to clarify for us just what was changing with the "instant game collection." "Everything that you've enjoyed from PlayStation Plus remains very much the same. It's still the same PlayStation Plus," Buser said. "So if you love the huge discounts, if you love the exclusive access to betas, if you love the other things that are also delivered by the service, you're going to see that those other things are still a part of PlayStation Plus -- the cloud saves, the automatic updates, all that other stuff."Really, the only difference is more free games, which we think everyone will agree is an improvement. "What we've announced is that we're amplifying the free games aspect of PlayStation Plus," he said. "We are really ratcheting that up, because that's what the community told us they wanted to see." As before, everything you download will remain playable until your membership lapses, so if every month is like June, your game collection is going to get very big very quickly. If your PS3's hard drive can handle it, that is.
PlayStation Home relaunches on PS3 tomorrow
That's right, if you've been anxious to see PlayStation Home's transformation for yourself, you'll get a chance to download the new client sometime tomorrow. Or you could just watch a video. Entirely up to you. As we've covered before, the update brings with it newly themed districts, some free-to-play games and a (hopefully) more useful hub. No specific time for (re)launch was given. %Gallery-138094%
PlayStation Home relaunches this fall with a questing system, themed districts
Big things are happening in PlayStation Home this fall. Sony has announced that an entirely new Home experience is currently in the works, one which it hopes will better cater to the needs of its users and offer a better experience overall. Home will relaunch with a new Hub and destinations based on desired gaming experience. The new Hub "integrates games, quests, community events and user-generated content, while providing players with additional navigation, shopping, socialization and entertainment options." Essentially, it's the launch pad to anything else in Home. Within the Hub, players can go over to the Activity Board to check on quests or create their own events and share them with their friends. Users can also check out the Activity Board to quickly jump to games and content. Outside of the Hub, there are four main areas: Action District, Sportswalk, Adventure District and Pier Park. As you can imagine, each caters to the needs of a certain gamer -- the Action and Adventure Districts both cater to hardcore and action-adventure fans, respectively, while Sportswalk is for sports nuts. Pier Park is an interactive theme park, replete with rides and games and such. This big update will piggyback on a core client update arriving this fall, which Sony hopes will help players get into games and content much quicker than before.
PlayStation Home is a good, profitable business, says Sony's Buser
Ask anybody what they think about PlayStation Home and you'll likely get one of two reactions: "What is that?" and "Meh." For PlayStation Home director Jack Buser, however, it's quite the accomplishment -- a "very good business model for PlayStation, and quite profitable," he told Gamasutra. "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." The numbers he's talking about look pretty decent on paper: there are over 100 games on the service, the average user session is about 70 minutes, there are over 50 unique spaces available and 14 million people have at least stepped foot in Home once. Not bad, but it's all about the context -- do people play those games? Do people explore those unique spaces? How many of those 14 million are actual active users? "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." So it's very much a long-tail thing, then? Look, you could probably present the numbers in any way possible and spin the service as a success, but for us, the real success is its ability to pull in new users, its effectiveness as a marketing tool and its profits from the sale of virtual goods. Log in now and you'll no doubt find a community there, passionate about Home. But is it pulling in new users? Are marketers beating down the (virtual) door to get into Home? And how much does Sony really earn from the service annually? Until we get less vague statistics and hard numbers, we might never know.
PlayStation Home population at 12 million
PlayStation Home director Jack Buser kicked off Sony's final day of GDC 2010 panels, announcing that the virtual community's worldwide userbase now stands at 12 million. The population has grown by two million users since December 2009, and is double of what it was in June of last year. Buser expanded on the stats, pointing out that these numbers aren't based on one-off visits; according to Sony's data, 85 percent of users who create a Home avatar return more than once. The average citizen, he said, spends an hour in Home each visit. While Buser's talk was primarily aimed at developers interested in developing in-Home games, he spoke on what to expect in terms of Sony's strategy for the service in 2010, saying, "You're going to see us really embrace this idea of total game integration" to "really extend out the experience of your games." He used the Home presence of Sucker Punch's inFamous as an example, saying that we can expect to see more spaces, minigames and tie-in content timed alongside game launches this year, and that "It's an Incredibly important part of [Sony's] strategy."
Sony discusses PlayStation Home's shift from social network to 'game platform'
Aside from providing a venue for a wonderfully childish gender bending game, PlayStation Home initially failed to offer PlayStation 3 users much of a playground. But the various Home spaces and minigames implemented by third-party developers have changed Sony's thinking, according to platform director Jack Buser: "In the early days when we built Home, we really were building a social network for gamers ... through that, over the last year, it's developed into a game platform, first and foremost."Speaking at a San Francisco meeting -- documented in detail by Gamasutra -- Buser described Home-based games as a "low-risk and high-margin" opportunity for developers. "Home is a high definition environment where you can create extremely polished games but with very rapid development cycles," he explained. "You can have small teams of developers -- a couple of engineers and a few artists -- crank out very sophisticated social gaming experiences in very small amounts of time."Buser also highlighted the value of community input in the "evolution" of Home, though he didn't indicate whether Sony had also stopped listening to that guy in the office who's really into Snow Crash. But even that guy might see the sense in Sony's vision, which is "about social, repeatable, fun, and dynamic games that are always changing and being fun for people." We haven't seen the "killer app" yet (we're still waiting in line), but renovating Home into a social games platform -- even if it's built atop the PS3's actual game platform -- seems like a much better use of all that segmented real estate.
Sony calls PlayStation Home a 'perfect storm,' next generation of content coming
PlayStation Home may be a fledgling platform, but its director, Jack Buser, thinks the unique 3D social space is turning into a "perfect storm." Within its three months of service, Home has grown quite a bit, and will continue to grow as it secures more publisher support. "You have publishers and brands coming into Home looking to engage with an audience, but they also have the opportunity to generate revenue. It's a model that makes sense for everybody," said Buser in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. "It's kind of a perfect storm." Peter Edwards, director of Home platform group at Sony, added to Buser's thinking, saying, "People are getting the hang of how it works," and hinting at the eventual arrival of the "next generation of content." Edwards pointed to Home's new ARG, Xi, as an initial spark that demonstrates other interactive options for publishers to play around with. "We're building a platform that other people can create content for, which is extremely difficult to do," said Buser. "We spent the time to do it right so that today we have something that is a total console differentiator."
Checking in on PlayStation Home
Eurogamer attended Jack Buser's GDC talk "Developer opportunities in PlayStation Home" and came back with some pretty interesting stats on Sony's virtual world. While early reviews of the service were negative, Home seems to be enjoying a pretty large user base, if only due to its ubiquity.Buser, Director of PlayStation Home in the U.S., claims that over 5 million people are using the service worldwide, with 2.2 million in North America. Additionally, visitors spend over 40 minutes per session in the world. He went on to say Sony plans to create, at minimum, three new "spaces" - Sony-built areas often used for promotional purposes - for inhabitants to explore each month. Whether or not critics like the service, it appears Sony is invested in Home, at least for the medium term.
GDC09: PlayStation Home to feature three new spaces every month
Have you seen everything there is to see in the Red Bull Air Race? Have you met with gamers in the Warhawk and Resident Evil 5 spaces? Hankering for more? No problem -- Sony's online community is rapidly expanding, whether you want it to or not. Jack Buser, director of PlayStation Home, promised GDC attendees that "you'll see about three new spaces launched a month." Unsurprising, considering the 20+ companies signed up to make content for the service.Surprisingly, Home has already accumulated quite a following, with over 5 million users worldwide, 2.2 million in North America. According to Buser, a "good space" will get a quarter of a million visits each week, with 75 percent of its users spending more than 10 minutes online. For advertisers, that looks like quite the sweet number.Buser didn't reveal a timeline of future Home spaces, but we do know that EA Sports and Guitar Hero will be getting new Home communities very soon.
Home's director Buser keynotes Engage! Expo in March
Jack Buser, director of PlayStation Home, is coming to the Big Apple. He'll be leaving the confines of Sony's virtual world and taking time off from quincying just to talk about Home in his keynote at Engage! Expo. No doubt he's there to gloat on how the social space / virtual marketplace has sold a million dollars worth of digital goods and how it just keeps on growing. Home has only been in public beta for little over a month, and come March 10 & 11 -- when the expo kicks off -- there might be a whole lot of new things for Jacky boy to talk about. Like all major shows, this expo is taking place at the Javitz Center on Manhattan's Westside.
Sony claims PlayStation Home will connect gamers like arcades did in the 80s
MTV Multiplayer blog contributor Stephen Totilo took a second look at Sony's Home -- a virtual world community for PlayStation 3 users. He had previously previewed the service at Kotaku and given it low marks. This time, though, he seemed a little more impressed. We're not really sure why he flipped, though. He wasn't very clear about it.Home features several instanced locations where PS3 users may converse and play minigames such as bowling. There are game specific rooms, like, say, for Warhawk, where users can get tips and such. It's a virtual world, not an MMORPG, but there's something interesting stuff in that preview. Obviously, it's most pertinent if you're a PS3 owner.During the demo, director Jack Buser suggested that the developers might eventually add non-human character models if the community demands it (but it's not part of the plan at the moment). Most of the preview is about how Home differs from its non-virtual-world competitor: Xbox Live. Buser said he hopes that Home will give users a place to meet other gamers in an environment that's more social than the games themselves. According to him, there hasn't been a good way to do that since the arcades of the 80s.
