People Buy Crap for Their Avatars? Even Sony Can’t Believe It

Sony’s hardware marketing director John Koller gets my props today
for saying something that would send other flacks into panic mode. He
recently showed astonishment that people buy virtual goods for their
Playstation Home avatar with real currency. “It’s amazing to me that
someone would buy a 50 cent chair for their PlayStation Home apartment
with real money, but the revenue that comes from that is significant,”
he said at iHollywood’s Digital Living Room conference in Santa Clara, according to The Register.
Koller said Home is a profit maker due to the advertising revenue and,
of course, the things people buy for their virtual selves. Koller
didn’t provide figures, but at E3, Sony noted that branded virtual goods for Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil 5 sold 200,000 units over two months.
Koller’s comments were part of a larger
discussion on how Sony wants to build out the Playstation 3 as an
entertainment hub. In addition to expanding Home, Koller said Sony will
experiment with original, television-style content such as reality
shows, exclusive to the Playstation Network. “We’re starting to turn
the PlayStation Network into an actual network as defined by what you’d
expect from an HBO perspective where new and interesting content
constantly breaks through,” he said. Though the content will probably
be gamer-centric at first, Sony would expand its offerings if the idea
caught on. The first show will launch in the coming months. [via The Register]