Home users "the most hardcore" on PS3

The populace of PlayStation Home are "the most hardcore gamers on PS3", reckons service director Jack Buser.

There are people that are "literally spending their lives inside of PlayStation Home", he told Giant Bomb - and they are "rabid consumers" of content.

"If you look at the average Home user, they are the most hardcore gamer on the PS3. 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," said Buser.

"We're talking about rabid consumers of media and hardcore gamers. That's who these people are."

"You have different kinds of users," he went on to explain. "You have users who are spending a tremendous amount of time on the platform, literally spending their lives inside of PlayStation Home. You have other users that are using PlayStation Home as something that they do between games. They'll have a big game they bought, they beat the game or otherwise get tired of the game, so what do they do with their console between that and the next time they buy a game? They use PlayStation Home."

PlayStation Home has 20 million registered accounts, although Buser won't reveal how many play daily. The average play time is a considerable 70 minutes, which can't solely be attributed to downloading/loading new areas.

PlayStation Home today is vastly different to the idealogical social hub Phil Harrison waffled on about during Home's Game Developers Conference reveal in March 2007.

"We made one fatal mistake in those early days," revealed Buser. "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. 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 realised that gamers talk to each other and they meet each other in the context of playing games."

Buser said there are more than 200 games now in PlayStation Home, although few truly represent what the service is capable of - potential that increased when Home gained real-time multiplayer functionality earlier this year.

Home games are typically free-to-play and supported by micro-transactions - a very lucrative market, should Buser and team exploit it.

But despite being playable publicly for two years and having come a great distance, PlayStation Home bizarrely remains in a beta state.

"The reason why the tag is there is because we really want to drive home this message that Home is always evolving, it's always changing, that we're always working on it," explained Buser. "We don't have anything to announce at this time, but we do like the idea that that tag reinforces this always evolving message. But I can't say more than that."

PlayStation Home is a free application available to anyone with a PS3 (and internet connection).

Below is the PlayStation Home announcement video from 2007. It's a different beast today, Home.