PlayStation Home Reaches 19 Million Users, Ready for MMO and FPS Games

At the Game Developers Conference, Sony has announced that its PlayStation Home social space for the PlayStation 3 has been downloaded more than 19 million times by those who use the gaming platform and that it will be delivering a new version of it this spring.

The new version of Home, which is labeled 1.5, will allow developers interested in it to create first-person shooters for it and even something Sony describes as MMO lite.

Jack Buser, who is the director of development for Home, has said the platform is “evolving from a social network into a world class gaming platform.”

An average session in home currently last about 70 minutes and there are now double the virtual items that Home had one year ago.

Sony has not said how much revenue it derives from Home.

It's not clear how many of those who downloaded Home are actually using it on a regular basis but the Sony executive claimed that Sodium, a racing game launched on the platform, has been played by 1.6 million players in about six weeks, which is a pretty good audience.

Home initially launched back in the month of December 2008 and has been constantly improved by Sony, which sees it as a continually evolving space where users can meet, develop avatars and sample stripped-down versions of popular PlayStation 3 game launches.

Home could benefit from more traditional gaming content, but Sony must be more interested in getting users interested in things like avatar customization options and in creating easy ways to move from a space in Home to an actual game that was launched on the PlayStation 3.

In the near term, Sony is thinking about launching a new version of its main home console, using the Slim profile, and specifically designed to eliminate the possibility of piracy.