PlayStation Home: What's new?

It depends on how the game is designed. A game like Sodium 2 is designed to be a balanced experience. You come in and race with your friends. If somebody wanted to purchase the booster using a microtransaction economy, then it's a matter of game balance.

There's a lot of talk about how to overcome the challenge and that's one of the more interesting things going on in game development right now - how do you incorporate this business model with game design? We're fortunate to have PlayStation Home developers who have really mastered this aspect of balance in their titles.

First off, I should say we're very excited about that number. For any service built into a piece of hardware, that's a very significant.

Right. There are a couple of things you have to do to get into PlayStation Home. First of all, you have to be connected to the internet - not everyone's PS3 is.

Second of all, you have to be connected to PlayStation Network. Some hardware is sold into territories where Home is not available. Then you have to come into Home.

So there is a process, and it is free, and we're extremey happy with the attach rate we do have, but you do have to register for PSN and be online.

I'm not so sure. I really think that in terms of getting people into Home, it's just a factor of how many people are playing games online, how many people are registering for PSN then coming into Home.

That said, to have that attach rate so high is really a testament to not just Home but also the PS3 userbase. That's a very, very high attach rate for a service on a piece of hardware.

There are two big factors which go into an active userbase. The first of these is acquisition - getting new users to come in and try the service. One of the great things about Home is that it's built into the Cross-Media Bar, it's core to the PS3, so that acquisition is really efficient for us.

The second factor is retention. One of the things we've found to be the killer app for retention on the platform has been games.

A lot of users who are coming into Home now are presented with a new Home navigator which allows them to access content relevant to them. This allows them to to get into these games and see the kind of experience we're providing now.

We also see a lot of users returning to the service now they see these kinds of games are available on the platform, and that many of them are free to play.

So we're quite happy with the direction the platform's growing in right now. This focus on games has really treated us quite well.

First of all, just come back in and play some of the games. Sodium 1 is currently live, Sodium 2 is coming soon, try out the Midway, Novus Prime, Dragon's Green...

There are so many great games on the platform which are ready to play. If you haven't fired it up in a long time, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.