Is there any better way to kick off the weekend than presenting you with a statistics report? Most definitely, but you will just have to make do with this for now.

Sony used Brighton’s Develop 2009 to unleash a bunch of statistics on the gathered audience, some of which pertained to the usage of the Playstation 3’s ‘virtual world’ service Playstation Home. Home director Peter Edwards let us know that “only 80 percent of users fall into the 18-35-year-old male demographic”, which means a 10 percent drop in traditional console usage. He also said that between 25 and 35 percent of PS3 users have used the Home service “at least once”.

“Home has a significantly broader spectrum of users than your typical console audience,” he said, “We are slowly broadening the appeal of the console demographic.” - Gamasutra

He declined to mention what percentage of those who have logged on to Home are currently active users, which is probably Sony’s way of saying “a lot less than we hoped”. We also don’t know who makes up the remaining 20 percent of users. For instance, how many of those users are female? Are most of them just males under the age of 18? The quote below is just one reporters experience of using Home:

A more recent dip into Home had fewer people saying lewd things to my avatar, though the surrounding conversations still seemed reminiscent of an adolescent-filled AOL chatroom (”a/s/l?”). Some users claimed to be as young as 11 years old, and proceeded to call surrounding users “gay dudes.” - Game|Life

The bottom line is that if you see female avatars in Home it’s more than likely that the person sitting in front of their TV is actually male. Given that some males seem to barrage those that are using female avatars it makes you wonder if some females are actually using male avatars to avoid being harassed.

Home is slowly getting more content, and some of it (such as the Red Bull air race) is worth logging on every now and again though. Unfortunately unless Sony comes up with something that makes you log in day in day out Home is not going to be the success they hoped it would be.

It seems like centuries ago when Sony first announced their virtual world experience Playstation Home, but in reality it was only back in 2007. Back then Sony had slated the release for the autumn of that year, but since we’re nearly at the end of 2008 and it still isn’t here we can safetly say that Sony’s original projections were easily over-optimistic. In the last few months a lucky few have been testing Home in the closed beta, but Sony is now saying that Home will be available to all in the open beta coming in the “next few weeks”. Well, if everything goes to plan it will be.

According to Home’s community manager - known as TedTheDog on the official PlayStation forums - Sony will be inviting a number of people into the closed beta pretty soon, before making it available to anyone with a PlayStation 3.

“Finally,” TedTheDog said, “Home open beta is the start of a long journey, not the end of one. I know I’ve said this a lot recently but I see many of you are thinking of Home open beta like a game release in that you’re expecting the final version to be launched with just some patches and maybe some DLC to come afterwards.” - CVG

I was beginning to think that Home would never see the light of day, so it’s nice to see that things are finally moving along. Hopefully the beta won’t last all that long and we’ll all be enjoying the full version by early next year, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Home open beta in “coming weeks” - CVG