CASE - Sony and PlayStation 4

Question: How to make PS4 seem more attractive to consumers?

•Advertisement

1.     Use Freelance.com to bring out hundreds of ideas for a visionary ad campaing.

Latest commercial ”Life of a PS4 player” is a good advertisement, but it doesn’t bring out the feeling of ”oh my gosh, I really want that”.

                a. Cheap approach to a large pool of idea rich creators.

2.     Ask your own gamers to build an ad (best videos should be rewarded, could be per category). Your trusted gamers have the best chance to use beautiful gameplay footage from PS4 (Uncharted 4, Witcher 3, etc.) to show the beauty and excitement when playing on PS4.

•Competitions, e-sports

1.     Best players should be on PS4, for that they need a reason and best motivation is money. Actual competitions where best players get a real rewards.

a.     Thanks to Youtube and Twitch, these competitions can be streamed for the whole world to see.

b.     Rewards can vary from $100,000 to a Sony TV or to 200e in PSN shop money, based of the importance of the competition.

c.      Some competitions should be purely silly in their idea to attract less serious gamers  like younger children (to grown loving the games and the community).

d.     Imagine a big tournament on a custom made PlayStation tournament map that is streamed to millions and news about the winner are published all around the media.

e.     Players can also participate by paying a minimal fee of for example $1. The participation money is then shared with the winners and this has cost nothing to Sony, but brought a bit of streaming fame.

•PlayStation Store

1.     Clarity and easiness to find certain products. It can be confusing and it is especially troublesome to find smaller games that are digital only.

2.     Support smaller game makers to find customers. Visibility is vital, feedback, support to be creatively crazy and experiment.

a.     You never know which small game leads to success and the next AAA title from that small company (like one certain Naughty Dog did).

3.     More special sales. Look at what STEAM is doing, they take advantage of every reason to have a big sale. Great reasons are: holiday sales (can be themed for the country as well), sport game discounts during big sport events and 20th year of PlayStation.

a.     For example: ”Your country just won gold in ice hockey World Championships, so here is NHL 16 for 60% cheaper.”
                     i. If you have made a good and solid console, then the customer never needs to rebuy. Therefore value of services as income provides is increased tremendously. Services, such as PSN+ need gamers who want to play so they bring income, therefore  it might even be more beneficial to get gamers by cheaper games so they buy the extra services.

4.     Pricing of big titles is too high. Do you have a good answer why a gamer should buy a digital copy for the same price, by which he can get it from his local store. Then a downloaded game doesn’t take a bunch of space from his hard drive, and when he doesn’t like the game anymore he can sell it and get money for a new game.
If you don’t have a solid answer to that, then something is indeed wrong.

a.     People choose to do what is easy and gives them what they want faster. The cheaper a digital copy is to a hard copy, the more it makes sense to choose the digital version.

                      i. You have a bunch of data about sales in your disposal, you have already analyzed possible price levels that are the best, right?

•Relatable face(s) that represent PlayStation brand

1.     PlayStation Access –team is a great idea and it should be used more. Their faces should be seen more in gaming media as representatives of PS4 to the gamers.

a.    
They could be the first to bring out big news about games and anything related to PS4.

2. Acquiring Kojima was a great decision. His face and name are well known, but more public relations work is needed since many heads of game development are badly known. Familiarity gets people to care about what you do.

•Indie developers

1. Support indie developers as much as you can.
a. Small developers are what grow to produce AAA titles, small developers take risks and have crazy ideas that sometimes become great ideas, small developers attract different type of players than generic AAA games. 

•Backwards compatibility

1.     PS2 console sold millions and millions, how many PS2 games are out there in players hands? Games that they can’t play on their new, beautiful and powerful PS4 (plus all those other millions of PS1 and PS3 games).

a.     I have seen many players like me that have their shelfs full of PS2 games to complain that they can’t play their old favorite games. Now Sony has started to bring some of those games in to PlayStation Store, but that only means players are forced to rebuy what they already have.

b.     Best solution in gamers eyes would be to make it possible to play all those games that they already own,  plus also making them available for purchase from PlayStation Store for those who don’t yet have them, or simply want the better graphics and trophies.

•Combo deals, TV + PS4

1.     Sony is also manufacturer of great TVs (and other electronics). Especially TV+PS4 combo deals would make sense.

a.    
Customer buying a TV/PS4 would be notified that buying the other as well would result in a discount of certain percentage.

b.     Customer buying a PS4 gets ANY PS4 game from the store shelf for X% cheaper.

                                          i.     Customer gets a PSN code to get any digital copy for free. This should be tied to the console to prevent code resales.

•Listen and  Acknowledge

1.     Players often complain that Sony does not fix the problems they try to point out.

a.     Acknowledge you have heard players and give feedback on the challenges you are attempting to fix at the moment.

                                      i.     When people think there is a problem and try to tell about it, but are not acknowledged that is when they feel they are not important enough to be cared about. Every gamer needs to feel like he is important. Listen and acknowledge what players say.

                                     ii.     Recent action to ask players to say what PS2 games they want to play on PS4 was a small, but good thing to do.

•Charity

1.     Donate consoles to children’s hospitals or other organizations.

a.     These can be PS4 / PS3 / PS2 consoles, just provide them with suitable games to make receivers happy.     

                                      i.     Positive publicity