Fun with Sony Home Numbers
Saw over on Evil Avatar a link to a Game Daily article that claims Sony’s Home is highly sticky and engaging. To quote:
"We’ve got 4 million users in PlayStation Home worldwide, and the average session in Home is about 55 minutes. And I challenge you to compare that to the amount of time people spend on websites where you’re in and out very quickly. To have someone spend 55 minutes, that’s more time than they spend watching and hour-long TV show where there’s 21 minutes of commercials. It’s a very sticky environment and it’s very engaging.”
I love these sorts of quotes… you can always tease out more information than you think. For example, you’ll note that there’s nothing stating that those 4 M users of Home are actually current, active users… nor is there a definition of what a Home user is. Is it someone who has used Home within the last 30 days? Someone who used it just once? Etc.
This is all very similar to the vagueness around PSN accounts. These numbers are meaningless until you clearly define what an active user is. I’d read this announcement as saying that less than a fifth of PS3s sold have ever tried Home (assuming around 21 M PS3 sales WW). And I wouldn’t be at all surprised that the average time for those people (who remember, may have only ever tried once!) was an hour or so. I spent at least that long just leaving my female avatar dancing away and watching guys hit on me. 
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming. Looks like a rainy weekend ahead here in Seattle – a good time to curl up with the Kindle and catch up on my reading!
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Pretty meaningless indeed when you consider the first time I tried Home it took well over an hour total to download and navigate everywhere. Once I had done that, I realised its just too last-gen (having to sit at loading screens, small environments, average graphics) and there isnt really anything fun to do.
So, I have clocked several hours of time in Home but i have made exactly 1 friend in there. Because it simply does not deliver the experience promised.
Also, since when has having to wait to go on an Arcade game or play Pool "in a computer game" become fun? The whole point of computer games is to avoid those issues.
Bearing in mind at the Snooker club I go to in the "real world" I have never ONCE had to wait for a table to play on, but in Home I have never once been able to play because all Pool and Bowling games are constantly full. So the few fun things to do in there I havent been able to do.
The Red Bull flying game is boring and also tricky to get into because Home always insists on locking onto other people in the environment instead of the "play game" option.
I wanted to love Home, I wanted it to be a large, streaming (once it had downloaded the environment to the HDD), seamless world, a realtime sandbox game/environment. I’m sure it can be done too, just not by Sony it seems.
This is why I’ve never bought and will never buy a Microsoft product.
Too much biased flame baiting FUD culture among ther company and fans.
I would like to buy a Xbox 360 to enjoy a some games, but it’s a Microsoft – anti ethic blantant unrespecting way of market.
In Japan (and in all over the world) people learn since childhood to respect others. You egomaniacs americans just mock everything contrary to your own beliefs. This is why people hate United States, and this is why people hates Microsoft.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion. But I note that you don’t discuss any of the specific points of the article, or the follow-up posts and comments. Do you disagree with anything in particular in those? And if so, why? Happy to have a conversation, but it needs to start somewhere.
Considering Sony are a Japanese company, how can you possibly use Japan as a positive in your argument?
Sony has made just as many if not more attacks on Microsoft than Microsoft has on Sony.
For a start, Sony claim that the Playstation 3 does not require lots of accessories like the 360 does, as it comes fully equipped. Despite the fact that Sony sell just as great a range of accessories for the PS3 as Microsoft do for the 360. Sure they do at least allow third-party Bluetooth devices and upgrading your own hard drive (the two things I feel the PS3 does better than the 360) but that does not alter the fact those things are accessories.
Also I still had a buy a remote to comfortably operate the Blu-ray functionality on my PS3 plus it is not even slightly backwards compatible with PS2 games and barely supports PS2 joypads. (some games are only compatible with PS3 pads despite PS2 pads being pretty much identical minus motion control)
Even better, I bought my 360 for playing games and added HD-DVD later on. As such I was enjoying gaming on the 360 while saving up to afford the HD-DVD drive. The PS3 on the other hand, I had to wait longer to get one because its a larger lump sum and I could only rationalise it once I knew I needed Blu-ray playback.
Don’t get me wrong, I am an avid Linux user and do think Microsoft can be high and mighty at times. However it sounded like you were claiming Sony as being the better party here when they clearly are not.
If you avoid buying an Xbox 360 purely based on disliking Microsoft then you are only hurting yourself. The Xbox 360 is an excellent games console and if you are always going to let moral values control your pleasure, you will be very very depressed. Powerful hardware comes from big businesses, big businesses have poor morality, fact of life sadly. You rarely get to be a big businesses by making big friendly choices.
I think you’ve just inadvertently suggested how Microsoft’s "17M Subscribers, Majority Gold" figures for Xbox Live are arrived at.
Nope – we’ve always been quite clear that these are active members.
These aren’t dead accounts that were created way back in the days of Xbox 1 and never used again.
At any case, the number of Gold suscribers would still give you a pretty good number of necessarily active suscribers… and that without counting the people who are just at silver. In fact, 17M does not seem that big of a number unless you are filtering all silver acounts on Games for Windows
So, Rojas, what’s your opinion on the comments Kutaragi made just a couple of years ago (Starting with ‘Xbox 360 is more like Xbox 1.5′ and all the way to ‘PS3 is so powerful it’s games could run at 120fps!!’)?
Ozy, is your website some magical time machine or why was the comment I posted a minute ago timed as January 23, 2008? Does that mean I’ll have to wait over a year for the Snowblind mappack now
?
Yes… yes it is a magical time machine. Next question?
<sigh> Not sure what’s up with that… let me ask the smart people.
Ok – think we’re fixed on the datestamp issue now. Looks like it’s fixed for earlier posts, too.
Hey, Ozy! Have you seen the new Project Offset video?
Man, that game was supposed to be launched on PC/360.
I cant believe MS let that game go. It is so promising.
Do something, buddy! We need that game on 360! hahaha
Hugs
http://www.projectoffset.com/…/index.php
what’s that saying again, "lies, damn lies, and statistics" or something like that?
Sure, they are spinning, but what would you expect. Don’t we all?
It’s not like other vendors never hand-waved around sell-in vs sell-through, just to pick an example
Hi Kim! The funny thing is that I could see you popping by either for Sony number comments, or Project Offset appearing.
@Rafoca: I’ve seen the video, think it looks fantastic! Larrabee is looking quite interesting… especially looking ahead 2-3 years as it evolves. I think gaming is going to look very different by 2015.
(Yes Kim, I’m picking safe numbers purposely.