badgenome said:
But he's not talking about marketing strategy or messaging. He's saying that the nature of the games themselves should be different. Just because something is called Call of Duty or LittleBigPlanet (and yes, of course a portable COD is going to be marketed as OMG!!!! U CAN PLAYZ COLLARDUTY ON TEH BUS!!!!) doesn't mean the games aren't made with the handheld experience in mind. It's like assuming that MGS: Peace Walker isn't fit to be a handheld game just because MGS 4 wasn't fit to be called a video game. The other thing is, Moffitt is a PR mouthpiece for Nintendo of America - which makes no games and no decisions. Everything they do is dictated on high from Japan. When you say, "Nintendo's strategy is this", you mean Nintendo of Japan's strategy is this. And that's a valid statement. But when you say "Sony's strategy is this"... which Sony do you mean? I get the distinct impression that the PSP only existed because Sony thought, "Hey! This PS2 thing is pretty huge! We should make a Gameboy!" And then the success of the PSP in Japan (and nowhere else, really) meant that the Sony Japan was always going to commission a successor. That means that SCEA gets stuck with a system they're not really enthused about. So SCEJ's strategy is to push Vita as the successor of the PSP: a place for hunting action games (sans the hunting action game). SCEE's is to push footy, sign indies like crazy, and make the occasional Tearaway or Invizimals (both pretty handheld oriented things). And SCEA's is to pretty much forget that the thing exists. Lazy ports and PS4 remote play are pretty minimal efforts, a way to do something with something they want nothing to do with. I don't know why the marketing of SCEA - the branch that is the least involved with the Vita - somehow takes precedence over that of SCEJ, which presides over the region where the Vita is doing most of its business. |
Marketing is a part of overall strategy. Marketing is or should be informed by the product. We would assume that if Sony is competent, they would base their ad campaign around what is the best feature of their system. One would also assume that Sony is competent enough to realize that they have to market the console in multiple regions (btw, the PSP's biggest region was Europe and America and Japan were neck and neck . According to VGChartz numbers more software was sold in US than Japan by about 15 million so far) and would design a product with multiple regions in mind as they are a global software company.
When someone who's job it is to market in the US talks about Sony's strategy, that they are talking about Sony's US strategy. That's what I'm talking about at least. Sony is publishing console games and marketing with the slogan "play like you do at home". It's not working as a strategy, but that's whwat they're doing right now. I'm going to assume that people are going to be held accountable if the Vita fails, so someone has to care if it succeeds. It may be a crappy strategy, but that's what they're going with right now.
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