Onling Gaming Tidbits for March 3rd, 2009

A few of the latest online gaming related stories in the news:

• PlayStation Network trophy pages are live – So far, you can only view your own trophies after you log into your own account. Great to get a quick overview if you’re away from your PS3 e.g., but a true gamer will want to proudly show off their accomplishments to the world with a public profile.
• Xbox Live struggled to increase its paid user ratio in 2008 prior to the NXE launch – An internal document shows that for the year leading up to the New Xbox Experience interface launch towards the end of 2008, the percentage of paying (Gold) Xbox Live members remained steady at slightly over 50%.
• Nexon America Names Daniel S. Kim New CEO – The US branch of Korean free2play pioneer Nexon (Maple Story, Kart Rider) gains a new leader.
• Sony Claims 20 Million PlayStation Network Accounts – A piece from last week: 20 million free accounts across PS3 and PSP at 70 million units sold total. Again, they don’t reveal active users, and compare this to 17 million paid and free Xbox Live users, but the mailing list they’ve built up alone is valuable in the long run.
• Halo 3 Exceeds 1 Billion Matches on Xbox Live – …yielded over two trillion seconds of playtime. Note: Never build an online game without some ability to track metrics for nice press releases like this.

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