Ruh-Roh - Will Sony be dwarfed by Apple's iPhone 7 conference?

[binary solo]

scrapking said:

binary solo said:
I don't really think it's relevant. Mass media is rarely important for gaming hardware buzz. It is more significant for bad news. When the mass media picks up on bad news in gaming then you know there's a problem. But good news travels extensively and sufficiently within gaming media.

I've seen lots of mass media news stories about new gaming consoles, all the way back to the Nintendo hey-days of the mis-80s, and continuing on to almost every console launched since.  Heck, I remember news stories about Atari before that.

It's mass market success that has propelled Sony's success.  It was success with the mass market consumer (thanks to Spyro, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, etc.) that propelled the PS1 past the Saturn and the N64.  It was mass market success that propelled the PS2 past the Xbox, Gamecube, and Dreamcast.  It was the Wii's mass market success (and to a lesser degree the Xbox 360's) that held the PS3 back (the PS3 would outsell the Xbox 360 for the first three quarters of the year most years, only to get soundly beaten by the Xbox 360 in the fourth quarter).

To suggest that free mass media news is unimportant to Sony is a mistake, IMO.  Sure that's true of the core gamers, but the most successful consoles reach well past the core gamers.

I think the world has changed a bit since the 1980s, even since the early 2000s. We have this all-pervasive, world-encompassing thing called the internet, and stuff like Facebook and Youtube and Twitter and all that. The home console business is more or less retreating to people who would call themselves gamers (even if only privately). While we might all be feeling happy about PS4's great sales, the fact of the matter is that this generation is going to see a major reduction in total console sales compared to the 7th gen, and probably will end up being lower than the 6th gen. Casual gamers have largely left the console market in favour of smartphone and Facebook gaming. All that add up to mass media attention being far less important for mid-gen gaming announcements than perhaps they once were.