When Playstation Home was first opened to the public quickly people decided if it was something they hated or loved. For those who did not find it much use, Sony is saying it may be worth going back and seeing what they have accomplished in the past two years.

In a interview with Develop, Home platform director Peter Edward said Sony is the “first to admit” how “basic” the service was at its launch in 2008.

“I hear all the time ‘I logged on when it first launched but there was nothing there’ – but I urge people to go back on there. It’s been two years,” “Since we’ve clarified our vision for Home, we’ve seen a huge amount of success, interest and positive feedback from the development community and users that this is right, that’s what makes people come back,”.

According to Sony since 2008 Home’s user base has hit 17 million users. There are 236 games on board, and Home has 7,000 virtual items to trade and holds 600 events.

“Certainly when we built the platform it was much more of a general, social platform for PS3,” Edward said.

“As it has grown up a bit we’ve also firmed up our ideas about what it is, what our strengths are, and what to build on. Hence our focus – people buy a PlayStation 3 to primarily play games. Sure, it does a lot of other great things, but PS3 is driven by games. So our audience is predominantly gamers. They want games.”

According to Edward the key to the success of Home is the free development kit.

“Studios can download the Home Development Kit now and start playing with it. That’s another area where our direction has been refined – we are focusing all our efforts on making the development experience as simple, cost-effect and easy as possible.”

“Home includes a fully fledged online multiplayer engine. All developers have to do is focus on making really cool content. So there’s great support from the Home team as well as the standard DevNet guys, there’s 24/7 Network support, and the HDK is very easy to use.

“We’re actually making it more configurable too – developers are getting used to it and want to play with it more, so we’re freeing elements up for the more adventurous developers.”

Personally what turned me off about Home was all the micro-transactions. It would of been fun to set up my apartment, but everything cost money I was not willing to pay.  So are you one of the people who has not touched Home in awhile? Are you going to give it another shot and see what changes have happened?  Tell us in the comment section.

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