The “Break it Down” Blog

In the most recent Bonus Round episodes (Online Services – Part 1, Part 2) analyst Michael Pachter, and all around good-dresser, proported that PSN was a complete Sony-fail with, what he guessed, was less than 1 million active users; part of his reasoning for stating this was that Sony never announced numbers for the service (but as the cut video from the show displays, they had previously).

It seems Sony got a little upset at that comment and re-clarified it’s current PSN statistics, more specifically:

PlayStation Network has truly hit its stride with unique downloadable games and a video delivery service featuring movies, TV shows, and original programming that you can watch in HD with your PS3, or bring with you on your PSP. And with 14 million active accounts and 273 million pieces of content downloaded, we know that you’re thirsting for this digital entertainment.

So that’s a warm plate of face served right there. Looks like Sony’s PSN is doing quite a bit better than I certainly anticipated and I don’t dress hardly as nice as Pachter does.

With the pending launch of Xbox Live Experience (this week) is PSN, even without the most basic social functions, actually giving Xbox Live a run for it’s money or does Sony only care about revenue-generating features (Movies, TV, rentals, micro-transactions, etc.) and social functions be damned?

As this episode of Bonus Round evaluated (and the panelists correctly stated) there really isn’t a huge reason for launching the upcoming Home service just to meet up with a friend to then launch a game… why not launch the game and be done?

We’ll have to wait and see, but 14 million users is nothing to sneeze at.