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PSP To Refocus on Teen Market
Wired's Game|Life blog, and writer Chris Kohler, have the news that the PSP will be aiming at teen users in the near future. This from PSP senior product manager John Koller, who connected the recent system price cut to this new initiative. "Going forward, Sony will unveil the 'Dude, Get Your Own' campaign. The idea this year, says Koller, is to 'break out of the home cycle.' A significant amount of PSP users in that 13-17 group play the device at home. 'The teens that are doing this value the ability to utilize the portability,' Koller notes paradoxically. By portability, he clarifies, he means 'I can play it upstairs while my parents are watching the TV downstairs.'"
No, they were working on the Mexican Squirrel market for a while there.
It wasn't that much of a hit among the /. basement crowd. As the summary said, Sony is now focused on the teenagers upstairs who actually -- gasp! -- know what the yellow light in the big blue room is. Sad but true.
Obviously, selling to the 55 to 75 demographic wasn't working
DJCC
You can play it anywhere in and around the house. Mowing the lawn? PSP! Cleaning the pool? PSP! Taking a shower? PSP! The finite possibilities downright scare me.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Black Handheld needs games badly.
Black Handheld, your life force is running out.
Black Handheld is about to die.
The modern story of Sony could be summed up in: "Someone shot the food!"
Tough to say.
Firstly, the PSP is fighting against decades of nostalgia. Despite the rise and fall in their console market share, Nintendo has been the undisputed champion of hand helds. They've defeated Atari, Sega (who even made a handheld Sega Genesis of all things), and anyone else who happened to try to muscle in. Simply put, if you played a dedicated portable game system in the past 20 years it probably was either Nintendo or one of those crappy $5 battery eaters.
Secondly, Lumines was great. That doesn't sound like it was bad for the PSP, but it was all the PSP really had going for it at first (at least in terms of games). People who bought it for games had to wait a long time for the now oft cited excellent titles to appear on the system. That slump both gave Nintendo the chance to prove the DS had what it took, and took away what had otherwise been excellent momentum from the PSP.
Thirdly, load times. The PSP is, to my knowledge, the first handheld that sports the oft maligned loading bar. I remember this being the most common complaint about the portable a year or two back. It takes the DS all of 2 seconds to boot up, and as few as 5 to get from there to playing the game. The worst I've ever seen was 15 seconds from "flip to frag". However, the PSP reportedly could take in excess of a full minute to load a game.
Fourthly, news. We don't hear much about the PSP in the news outside of how homebrewers have again bypassed the latest firmware update, or how the DS is outselling it 2 to 1. We don't hear about how a game sold incredibly well, only about how everyone loves New Super Mario Bros. or Nintendogs. We learned about the death of UMD, while at the same time learning about how Nintendo was broadening and expanding the market. While the games problem is at this point rectified, there isn't much good news to be heard.
Fifthly, the PS3. While it may not be fair, a number of people have turned against Sony for what they see as an outrageous insult to their intelligence and pride. Should the PS3 be viewed as such? Not really, but for some it is. That also translates into anger against anything Sony, which includes the PSP. Guilty by association I fear.
Lastly, Sony PR. All of the above are conquerable and defeatible obstacles, except Sony's PR is terrible. We might have figured it out back with the borderline racist squirrels, or the ill-conceived graffiti campaign. They might have noticed when their PS3 ads and marketing were similarly ill-received. However, the bottom line is that if Sony had made the Wii or the DS, even with the same line-up of games and Shigeru Miyamoto behind them, Sony's PR would block the pathway to success like a giant, immovable boulder. They more than anything else are in a position to solve the issues the PSP faces because they are mostly issues of image, but they have also proven themselves to be absolutely incopetant at their job. They're even bad at finding other people to do their job for them (again, see the graffiti and that "grass roots" website campaign). In short, Sony's ball and chain is their PR, and until they stop dragging that dead weight behind them they'll never be able to catch Nintendo.
I'd rather like that all to change. It'd be nice if the systems could be weighed purely on their merits and achievements rather than by the stupid things their PR departments do.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!