Monday May 6, 2024

PlayStation Home hits 10 mil users

Home's population reaches a milestone, with areas opened for Uncharted 2 and Ratchet and Clank A Crack in Time.

Posted on Dec 18, 2009 - 9:03am EST

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has opened the doors to two stunning new spaces in PlayStation Home for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Ratchet and Clank A Crack in Time, with a MotorStorm space set to arrive soon. Each space has its own distinct feel offering an interactive area where all of the 10 million users can get a taste for the title, hang out with other fans, enjoy fascinating mini-games and watch the latest game footage.

For developers, it’s a chance to showcase their products and creativity to their core audience; the MotorStorm space, for example, is decked-out as a garage-come-industrial warehouse, complete with DJ area, dancefloors and chill-out zones, while offering new merchandise and quest rewards. Game spaces become hubs of interaction between gamers and developers – a meeting place to share experiences, fun and information that benefits the gaming community as a whole.

“PlayStation Home is fast becoming the meeting place of choice between users and developers,” said Dan Hill, European Home Business Manager at SCEE. “Every new game space enhances the overall experience for consumers, offering more variety, more choice and more enjoyment from a PlayStation Home session. The more game spaces there are, the better it gets, and the number of spaces keeps on growing. For developers, there’s no better way of driving interest in their titles than giving fans a hands-on, interactive experience based around the game itself. A game space in PlayStation Home ought to be a core element of every studio’s marketing strategy for new titles.”

The new spaces join a growing club of titles with their own PlayStation Home areas, each of them very different. The Resistance 2™ space is a destroyed Chicago railway station, while SingStar® has a virtual nightclub called the SingStar Rooms, which hosted a question-answer session with Dizzee Rascal earlier this year, with Dizzee appearing in avatar form to meet and greet his fans. It’s not just games companies that are involved with PlayStation Home either: fashion leader Diesel, energy drink makers Red Bull and furniture-makers Ligne Roset are all on board.

European Product Marketing Director Mark Hardy explains: “As we continue to develop integrated marketing campaigns, we are increasingly driven by the flexibility and level of engagement offered by our online channels. From PlayStation Blog to the SingStar community to the enormous creative potential of PlayStation Home, we are now having a proper, two way dialogue with our customers and at the same time giving them the opportunity to sample and shape the way we create our products.”

It’s all happening in PlayStation Home, the ever-expanding, open-ended online realm for PlayStation 3 users where the possibilities are endless.