The upcoming battle between the Nintendo 3DS and Sony NGP will be determined by the marketing — specifically how well Sony is able to convey the capabilities of its system. Remember the first few years of PS3 marketing? They sucked. The commercials, ad campaigns, etc. were wonderfully stylish spots…that didn’t say much and confused the audience. Sony has stepped it up a notch — especially with the excellent Kevin Butler commercials — but the challenge remains.
Nintendo will have a relatively easy time marketing the 3DS. The biggest and most obvious differentiator is its 3D graphics. That’s easy to sell and easy for the audience to understand, particularly casual gamers.
On paper, the NGP is much more diverse and capable, but also much harder to explain in comparison to its competitor. It has a high-resolution five-inch screen with OLED technology. It has a wonderfully advanced CPU and GPU. It has potentially fascinating social features. All of these things are more difficult to explain than 3D graphics — especially to the general consumer.
How do you think Sony will market the NGP? Will it have to outspend Nintendo in order to get consumers to understand why it’s so powerful? Will Sony learn from its mistakes with the PS3 and convey a clear message with the NGP? If you worked for Sony marketing, what aspects of the NGP would you highlight?
I would market it as next gen portable gaming because that's what it is and I think that's what they are going to do. The PSP2 and the 3DS are targeting two different markets. Of course the 3DS's market is much larger.
There's a lot of overlap in the respective target markets, especially when you consider price.
Sure, there's some overlap but I've seen a lot DS devices in the hands of many children and teenage girls but I've never seen a PSP in their hands.
Again, consider the price. The competition between 3DS and NGP will be very different from DS and PSP. The DS launched at a mass market price. The 3DS will not. The 3DS and NGP will almost definitely have closer launch prices (in terms of percentage) than the DS and PSP.
Yeah, you have a point. The 3DS won't be too much cheaper than the PSP2, but the PSP never had a killer game like Pokemon.
Not in American anyway. Monster Hunter does crazy business in Japan.
I can only come up with the competition's ads.
"do anything outside of EULA and Sony will seize all of your electronic"
Followed by a Nintendo, MS or Apple logo lol
Ouchie.
"It only does everything in the palm of you hands."
Sticks with the current (and successful) marketing model.
Addendum
"it only does everything** in the palm of your hands"
** until we disable or remove functionality
Man you're angry about this GeoHotz thing.
haha, nice one. I didn't get to this quick enough apparently. I was just trying to think of a good way to change that slogan.
@Ray
I think it's absurd.
I also disagreed with them removing the feature when they first did it.
ray
since i have absolutely no idea what smartguy is talking about, could you do an article on it?
I think we discussed it in a Coffee Talk comments discussion. I'll write a bit more here when I get back to my PC.
its cool, i just looked it up and remembered….i dont follow stories about ps3 hacking, mainly because i have no interest in pirating games.