Average PS Home user is "the most hardcore gamer" on the PS3
PlayStation Home director Jack Buser has said the virtual world's fans are among the most dedicated gamers of the PlayStation 3's user base.
"If you look at the average Home user, they are the most hardcore gamer on the PS3," Buser told GiantBomb.
"They buy more games than the average PS3 user, they play more games than the average PS3 user. They also watch more movies than the average PS3 user, who is already a highly self-selective consumer. We're talking about rabid consumers of media and hardcore gamers. That's who these people are."
Buser said Sony made a "fatal mistake" in the early days of Home by expecting gamers to want to socialise and communicate in a specialised context.
"You put a bunch of gamers together in a room and you tell them to talk to one another and they don't do it. This is the 20/20 hindsight part. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it wasn't obvious back in 2008," he said.
"We thought 'here, we'll build these rooms and we'll fill them with gamers and we'll theme these rooms after games and then people will self-select and talk to each other.' What we discovered very early on, even in closed beta...we realized that gamers talk to each other and they meet each other in the context of playing games."
This is one of the reasons why Home's latest and most major update so far, 1.5, introduced a number of back-end features which make it easier for developer to implement games inside the service - and Buser wants detractors to take ahnother look.
"We would be remiss to ignore the people on PlayStation who may have come in 2008 and walked into Home and said 'yeah, there's nothing here and left' and formed their opinion," he said
"We would love to see those people come back in. But I get it. If you come into a platform and there's nothing there for you, you're going to be hesitant to come back. That's why we're very focused on this idea of games, because if it's a great game, why not come back in and play it?"
Not convinced anybody really uses Home? The full article is available through the link above, along with an earlier piece on the service's fanbase.