| Kynes said: There are three things that resume videogames here in Spain: - A lot of people has a generic name for video consoles, "La pley", a phonetic contraction of the name playstation. Before PS1, home computers had a very strong portion of the video games market. Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga... were the strongest platforms here. Since the PS/N64 generation, most people bought the videoconsole you could pirate, in this case the Playstations, so Sony made of Spain a Stronghold. - Another thing is Football (Soccer) games, which almost every month are at the top of the lists.There are people that only buy Pro/Fifa, but they buy them every year. - And the third is piracy. I'm almost sure that Spain is one of the most piracy-friendly countries all over the developed world, I think only second to South Korea. Almost all the DS sold here means a R4 cartridge sold, the piracy webs are of the most important all over the world, and yes, the X360 has an alarming rate of pirated consoles. |
This also applies to Portugal, and most of the european countries, from what my friends tell me.
The PlayStation brand is super strong in europe, this is where Sony's main strength is, they built a huge audience with the casual stuff (SingStars, etc), soccer (they have sponsored the Champions League for a long time, and PES / FIFA are huge), and Gran Turismo (most people took the "real driving simulator" thing a bit too much to heart and think GT is the only good car game).
If it wasn't for the UK, 360 would have very weak numbers in europe. Here in Portugal, it's so small that even huge retail outlets have single store displays for 360, and 4 displays for PS3, for example. And to the "common" person, games and "PlayStation" are so intertwined that when I said to my best friend's wife that I had bought an Xbox, she asked me "That's a PlayStation thingy, right"? lol
It's become a culture thing, and even Sony's mistakes with the PS3 didn't tarnish that, people just waited for PS3 to drop price instead of buying other consoles, and most of the mass market only really cares for the casual SingStar / GH / Buzz games.
