It’s well documented – people went crazy over Sony’s placing of the SingStar trojan horse on the PlayStation 3’s XMB when they shoved it on us in a firmware update towards the end of last year, but for the publisher and the studio, it worked.

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The project has netted Singstar 1.5 million new users [via] since the October change. In comparison, there were 2 million users in the preceding five years. You might not like having that icon there, but for Sony, it’s a success.

The game, which is now free to play (with users just buying the songs they want) has a conversion rate of around 6%, with the discussion (at Develop today) by London studio director Dave Ranyard indicating that some have bought over a thousand songs.

Ranyard says that the team added lots more points of purchase (after watching a video, for example) and streamlined the whole purchasing system from six clicks down to three, removing as many barriers to entry as possible.