Okay. Great.

I haven't been on Home in well over a year.  Perhaps I'll give it a look again.

That's good to hear, but I'm still not using the fucker >.>

It isn't a total failure, but it still suffers from some disappointing issues in several departments and that is what hurts PS Home in the eyes of most gamers. I can still remember how frustrating PS Home was when I first tried it. 

It's not that Home is a failure because clearly there's an audience for it. It's frustration that Sony put more effort into providing content and support for PlayStation Home than they do almost anything else for their consumers. 

People do weird things in home. It's scary. 

"
http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/217562/playstation-home-whos-using-it-and-why/   According to Gamepro, 17 million users use Home for an average of 70 minutes. Now, can someone explain to me how that is not good stats?"

I'm still not clear on what the point of Home is. I haven't touched it since the day it launched, but Sony certainly hasn't put any effort into informing me of ways that I might actually care about it.

" People do weird things in home. It's scary.  "

Home is just a waste of time. People can use it all they want, and the numbers can say people are on it but there is no denying that Home is just a 3D chat room with customizable avatars.  
 
I liken it to Gaia Online, but 3D. Avatars, Games, Theaters, etc. AKA a waste of time.

It's a great place to troll.

" @Hamz: hmm, why do you say that? Hasnt SONY done alot for their Customers in the retail games, services  and other  stuff on their console? "

70 minutes of usage is a success?

They're missing the Y axis of this chart: time. If people are spending 70 mins a week, then hotdog, it's a genuine thing. But if it's in total for the past 2 years... That's horrible. And keep in mind that that's only the people who cared enough to download it in the first place.
 
This is just Sony trying to entice some people back. Probably rightfully so, it seems there's a lot of content to be had in Home now.

" Home is just a waste of time. People can use it all they want, and the numbers can say people are on it but there is no denying that Home is just a 3D chat room with customizable avatars.   I liken it to Gaia Online, but 3D. Avatars, Games, Theaters, etc. AKA a waste of time. "

Home is and forever will be a failure due to the fact that they haven't and never will give us the things they showed and promised. Where the fuck are my tvs that can play any of my videos in my house? Or my speakers so I can host a massive party with my own music. Or my fucking trophy cabinet displaying all my trophies. WHERE THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?

" @Hamz: hmm, why do you say that? Hasnt SONY done alot for their Customers in the retail games, services  and other  stuff on their console? "

I find it odd that the #1 response to anyone who hates anything popular is:
"This many people use it, so how could it be bad?"
 
People like stupid things. Just because a lot of people like something it doesn't mean that it is good. If your going to defend something, don't use the popularity angle.

" I find it odd that the #1 response to anyone who hates anything popular is: "This many people use it, so how could it be bad?"  People like stupid things. Just because a lot of people like something it doesn't mean that it is good. If your going to defend something, don't use the popularity angle. "

I've never been into that type of  thing (Second Life, Gaia, etc) and Home seems very advertise heavy.  I wish Sony put their resources towards something better.  Running around in a 3D "virtual reality" is not what I want to do on my PS3.  It's not something I want to do at all.

" @Landon said:

" I find it odd that the #1 response to anyone who hates anything popular is: "This many people use it, so how could it be bad?"  People like stupid things. Just because a lot of people like something it doesn't mean that it is good. If your going to defend something, don't use the popularity angle. "

Farmvile or facebook in general for example. "

I've had a PS3 for over a year and I've never booted up home. I thought it just kinda faded out of existence. 

" @trophyhunter said:

" @Landon said:

" I find it odd that the #1 response to anyone who hates anything popular is: "This many people use it, so how could it be bad?"  People like stupid things. Just because a lot of people like something it doesn't mean that it is good. If your going to defend something, don't use the popularity angle. "

Farmvile or facebook in general for example. "

Justin Beiber and the Jonas Brothers.  The Nintendo Wii.  Reality TV. "

It's definitely a good thing for a certain crowd. I enjoyed messing around with it a bit, until I needed the chunk of memory that it was taking up.

" Home is just a waste of time. People can use it all they want, and the numbers can say people are on it but there is no denying that Home is just a 3D chat room with customizable avatars.   I liken it to Gaia Online, but 3D. Avatars, Games, Theaters, etc. AKA a waste of time. "

Some time ago, the crew on the joystiq podcast summed up the problem with using a virtual space to interact with content. They did this with a simple example: 
 
No one wants to wait for the bus to take them to Wikipedia. 
 
I think we're learning that high-fidelity Virtual Spaces are more inconvenient than useful, and that the future of online interaction is more like Xbox Live than it is Tron.

70 minutes? Service has been out for a while, that sounds like a total failure to me. I think that's the 17 million people who tried it for an hour, then never touched it again.  
 
Anyway, I don't even understand what the PS Home is for. Ads? I get enough in the XMB as it is. Chatting? Ugh, who does avatar based chatting anymore, anyway? It was a novelty, but come on, it's really dumb. It's just taking one single feature of an MMO and making it the focus. Boring!

"
http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/217562/playstation-home-whos-using-it-and-why/   According to Gamepro, 17 million users use Home for an average of 70 minutes. Now, can someone explain to me how that is not good stats? I personaly have used home atleast twice a week since its launch and ive enjoyed it. Its way better then it was when it launched, and I dont see how people can still hate on it like they once did. I think people have gotten so used to the hate that they have assumed that its bad and they hate on it even if they havent used it yet or used it in a while and peopel that did use it originaly that did hate it in the beginning have  refused to change their opinon on it or acknowledge that its actualy not a complete waste or a failure. This goes for gamers and journalists alike.  You can say it hasnt lived up to expactations to you personaly, but its nowhere near a flat out overal failure.  I merely ask how something that has 17 million users that use it on average for 70 minutes when they use it be considered a failure? Plus its making SONY millions. "

That's like 16 million users playing it for 1 minute and the rest for a few hours. That's really not impressive at all.  In fact, that's actually really bad: it shows a lot of people were interested, checked it out, and it failed to impress them. 
 
That's a failure in my mind. It just has a larger than usual group of nichers who stuck with it, as every online thing does (name any MMO that anyone rational would deem a failure - Fallen Earth, That stupid FPS game whos name I can't recall, etc) and they'll defend it to the death as the best game ever. 
 
The reason Home has a high volume of nichers is because it was free, as such more people were reached out too. These type of people play a shitload. 
 
Still pretty bad numbers. 
 
That said, I say nothing about the quality of the game. Maybe it is amazing, I've never played it and don't know. But still those ain't good numbers.

Isn't it just a marketing tool that tricks people into thinking it's a social application? In the same way marketing firms use Twitter and Facebook are used to advertise games and albums for free.

People still defend Home? 
 
..........lol.

I used it for 2 minutes in my life

do you still have to pay for virtual furniture? with little in the way of free options? if so, then it's still as lame as ever.

That's the thing about statistics: when not put in context, they're completely meaningless. 17 million users... are those unique users? How many times did they log in? For all we know, half of the PS3's installed base logged in, messed around for 70 minutes trying to figure out what the big deal was, said "this sucks", and stopped using it forever. We also don't know if a fraction of users use it for hours and hours, and then the vast majority use it for just a few minutes. 70 minutes is a pretty low number actually, so that's likely the case. We also don't know that Sony isn't reporting "logins" as "users", and counting the same people over and over every single time they log in. These companies play fast and loose with numbers all the time, so there's no reason to expect them not to here.
 
I'm not a big fan of Home myself; there's very little meaningful content, and all of it can really be found elsewhere. The avatars look dead and lifeless, the regulars can be more than a little creepy, and it all feels like a giant venue to sell people fake clothing. That may have some appeal to casual gamers, but not to me. I feel like Home was a giant failure because it was intended to broaden the PS3's appeal, and nobody can really say that it has done that. There probably isn't a single person out there who bought a PS3 just for Home. I feel like this thing is a huge distraction from more important things, like, say, making the firmware update process not suck, getting PS2 compatibility working again, cross-game chat, or just about anything else.

I only logged into Home once....three years ago.

When it launched, I probably tried it for roughly 60 minutes. Have not touched it since. Will not load it up again. Not my thing.

The fact that they keep adding shit to home and that it still runs is an achievement in itself.
 
Will I ever use it for more than 10 minutes? Hell no, but I'm happy that some people can find fun in it.

" @Hamz: hmm, why do you say that? Hasnt SONY done alot for their Customers in the retail games, services  and other  stuff on their console? "

" @Malakhii said:

" People do weird things in home. It's scary.  "

Agreed. This dude (who will remain nameless) was going around randomly spamming people with verbal ads in Home (in the Movie Theater and Mall sections). Kept tossing out random ads and service promos before he got removed. What a idiot n_n "

I've logged into home a few times. It's a neat little thing, undeserving of great praise or great hate.  
 
Largely, yeah, it's a fucking marketing approach. Of course it is. Anything anyone has ever given to you for free is a piece of marketing. The only purpose of a free thing is to entice you to eventually buy something. Otherwise, it would have no functional purpose for the company.  
 
This isn't immoral either. Companies are not tricking you; they are showing you something they hope you like so you buy other things you may also like. It's logical.  
 
Home has some fun stuff in there. There's hundreds of game spaces, most with little mini-games. It's basically like a giant website where you walk around, play decent flash games, maybe chat, and leave. Some things like the Buzz Quizshow game are legitimately fun. Some aren't so inspired. But, it's not a bad way to kill some time.  
 
Has it succeeded in changing the face of gaming or any other hyperbolic claims? Fuck no. No console has ever lived up to the expectations set at any press conference. But, it's not a bad time, and it makes Sony money, so what's there to worry about?