Real world furniture store mydeco in virtual deal with PlayStation Home

by Jennifer Whitehead, revolutionmagazine.com 17-Nov-09, 14:15

LONDON - Furniture store mydeco.com is to start selling a range of virtual furniture to gamers after signing a deal with Sony's social gaming platform PlayStation Home.

Mydeco.com sells real life home furnishings, but is known for its 3D Complete Room Planner, which lets people plan their interior design using a database of 75,000 3D modelled pieces of furniture.

Now gamers using PlayStation Home, the community-based social gaming network, will be able to buy iconic pieces of virtual furniture to decorate their PlayStation apartments. Most items will sell for €1.99 but the sofa based on the iconic Marilyn Monroe lips design will be available for three. The network has seven million users.

It has been estimated that the value of the global virtual goods market hits is worth as much as $6 billion, with gaming micropayments accounting for about 75 per cent of this.

Daniel Hill, home business manager at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, said: "Home has been available to the public for almost a year and in that time; we have greatly increased the amount of content available to both purchase and for free. Introducing mydeco to Home will not only bring more options for users to personalise their experience, but is another great example of the cross over between the real world and the virtual world."

The mydeco store will be found as a concession in Threads, Sony's own store from today.