If you take the time to read some forum posts, most people have multiple accounts on psn for downloading from each territories store. This is done because, while some demo's are released in all areas at the same time, most are just released in one or two specific regions at a time.
For example Ninja Gaiden sigma came to the USA store two months before the European. Ratchet and Clank and Uncharted similarly so, though the delay may have been less. To get round this, fevered gamers not prepared to wait are making more than one playstation network account in the required territory. This seems to only require a valid post code for the region to work. So far so good, no harm done.
Indeed, there is never any real harm done here, but is it a sales pitch? Are Sony counting each account as a separate person in their numbers for amount of users on psn. If so we can probably half the number of users for a more accurate statistic of total conscious human users on the psn.
It does seems that Sony are actually trying to foster this practice so that they can claim a larger amount of users than there are to use as a bargaining chip then they talk about xbox live. We have x million users in our first year, xbox live had x million less in it's first year etc. How do Sony seemingly unwittingly foster this, they release demos in differing territories and then wait weeks before releasing them to the others, why?
The only reason can be localisation, now i understand that for Europe this can be a headache, surely a multinational with the resources of Sony can help the game developers of their biggest franchises to do this quicker so that demo's can be released simultaneously in each store.
From my own point of view there is no excuse for delaying from the Us to the Uk, we both speak the same language after all. Hell give the rest of europe the choice to download the english only version early if they want most Europeans can speak english better than I can as their second language.
Sony have the power to see where a playstation is in the world when it's online, they can close the loophole that allows you to make multiple accounts. If they actually didn't want you to be able to do it then you can be certain it would be harder to do.
So there is my point, maybe at the start it was just something they never thought of, and then they saw it. Picture the scene, two guys deep in Sony HQ staring at their server's screens.
Admin: "Look, that guy from Europe just made a usa account?"
Boss: "What did he do that for, never knew you could!"
Admin: "He's getting that demo for ninja gaiden from the store."
Boss: "Send in the lawyers!"
Admin: "Hang on the demo is free."
Boss: "Oh, ok, hang on a second, so he now has two accounts?"
Admin: "Yes, two accounts, one person."
Boss: "That means we can say that the number of users on psn is higher than it is
Admin: "I suppose so, look, when I search there are hundreds of people doing it, also for the Japanese territories too."
Boss: "Tell no one, i have to go and revise the demo release schedules, ha ha ha."
There they have it, a loophole generated by their users that they can legitimately use as a claim for user number figures and have deniability when someone calls them on it.
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