I know a lot of you don’t enjoy WoW, or at the very least you’ve burnt out, but I’m still having a lot of fun playing, and I can only see that going up. The main reason: people.

I got back into WoW basically because I knew that a buddy who plays League of Legends was around. I didn’t think – not in a million years – that I would be back with my old raiding guild just a month after I started playing again. It’s actually pretty exciting and has turned out to be the thing I missed most from the game experience on the whole. It’s really nice to have a group of people consistently around for a game. I have that to a smaller extent currently in LoL, but I spent hours with these guys (and gals – hi Ishi!), for good or ill, and it’s been fun to reconnect.

If you find yourself bored or disinterested in any game, I’d recommend one of two things – get to know some people in game, or get to know some people in real life. Either way, you win and win big.

Despite the service’s non-priority status, Playstation Home has hit a significant milestone this week. According to a press release this morning, the place “where users and developers meet” has hit 10 million users. The news comes as Home has opened new spaces recently, including one for Uncharted 2.

“Every new game space enhances the overall experience for consumers, offering more variety, more choice and more enjoyment from a PlayStation Home session,” said Dan Hill, Sony’s European Home business manager. “The more game spaces there are, the better it gets, and the number of spaces keeps on growing. For developers, there’s no better way of driving interest in their titles than giving fans a hands-on, interactive experience based around the game itself.”

Well, a hands-on, interactive experience with the game itself always seemed sufficient to me. Really, I have very little interest in Home as any sort of serious marketing platform. It might be a nice way for Sony to make a few bucks if they can properly monetize it, but I can’t imagine the value for developers being as high as Hill makes it out to be.

Playstation Home doesn’t get a lot of airtime in the states, but it is a little more active in Europe. At the London Games Conference this week, Sony’s director of Playstation Home for Europe, Pete Edwards, said the virtual space has a viable business model but that it’s not a priority for the time being.

“It’s been a long road,” Edwards said. “We’ve proved there is a market out there and we’ve got a lot of people that spend a lot of time in [Home]. It’s not a priority right now but there is a business model there.”

Edwards said earlier this year that European users average 56 minutes in Home per session. That sounds like enough time to consider investing more heavily in the service, but it says nothing of number of users or just what those users are doing. Idle time is a lot different from time spent exploring and interacting with the locations.

Home isn’t going the way of Nokia’s N-Gage, but it’s pretty clear the service won’t be getting much more interesting any time soon.

Source: Edge Online