Thursday, January 6, 2011

Sony: PSN Has 60 Million Members

Sony has announced that it's Playstation Network has grown to some 60 million accounts strong, doubling up on Microsoft's LIVE numbers of 30 million.

It's an impressive number that the company should be proud of- the PSN has had it's fair share of problems since it debuted and credit should be given to the gaming giant for getting a firm grasp on the issues it had and ironing out the wrinkles.

Not to throw any chilly H2O on the release, but it has to be mentioned here that it's pretty common for a single user to have several accounts on the PSN since signing up is free and there's no additional cost to play online multiplayer. In particular- opening up foreign accounts when territory-exclusive demo's are released is almost standard at this point. It's a practice that's a little less attractive on Xbox LIVE since, while joining at the Silver level is free, being a Gold member (which gets you access to online multi) is fifty bones a year.

60 million is still a great stat that Sony can toss around- it's just that we're probably not talking 60 million unique users. Which is to say that it's probably not quite as great as they would very much like you to believe.