The director of PlayStation Home, Sony's Peter Edward, has disclosed to Gamasutra a number of interesting facts about the platform/service, including the registered userbase, demographics and advertising statistics.
Registered Users: According to Edward, Home now has "7 million inhabitants", of which 3 million hail from Europe, and those "inhabitants" have downloaded 6 million "virtual items" between them.
Sounds good! Problem is, like Second Life (and, to be fair, most online titles), Sony don't count active users, they only count registered users. So if you logged into Home, walked around for 30 mins, hated it and never came back, you're still counted as an "inhabitant".
Which isn't the most useful statistic. For a better idea of how many people are actually using Home, we can look to some advertising figures...
Advertising Details: Edward revealed for the first time some details on the advertising within Home, in particular the success of two of the more prominent examples to be found so far within the service: the Red Bull air race, and the promotion for the Watchmen movie.
Edward says that the Red Bull game has logged 873,136 unique users, while the Watchmen promo tallied 812,544 unique users. With those two attractions being so prominent, and with those two numbers being so close, it looks like Home's active, regular users may well be closer to those figures than the "7 million" figure quoted.
Strange they don't quote that number. After all, if they could boast that Home had 1 million active users (which if it doesn't already have, they must be close), wouldn't that look, well, better?
Demographics: Finally, Edward says that Home's userbase skews mostly towards the "core" gamer, with the finding that a whopping 80% of Home's users are 18-35 year-old males.
Gamasutra
