I also think Sony is actually getting nervous about how older the Playstation audience is getting. The average 20 year old from the PS2 era would be in their 40s now.
They haven't been growing the younger part of their fanbase that well especially post PS2 era and I would bet their internal metrics/demographics are showing they have an aging brand. So they are trying to do stuff like this and Astro Bot as a result.
For as much shit as Nintendo gets for making sure new generations of kids are always a priority for them, the fact is the kid who was 10 years old when the Switch launched in 2017 .... well guess what? They are 17 now. And Nintendo is just making lifer fans like nobody's business getting kids locked into their love for IP like Mario, Pokemon, Zelda, etc. early. And I see this all the time too when I'm in the Nintendo section of stores, I see majority 16-30 somethings and I know that "oh yeah Nintendo locked these customers in 8-15 years prior".
Also today the popular culture is a lot different from the late 90s/2000s where there was an over emphasis on wanting to ditch things you enjoyed as a kid in favor of being "cool/hard/badass", today it's perfectly reasonable that to continue to enjoy things you liked as a kid into adulthood without any fuss about it. So Nintendo's philosophy in a lot of ways won out ... they played the long game and it paid massive dividends.
I think Sony is OK with Horizon on Switch because they recognize that they need to at least try and get some of that younger energy into their console platform. It's a weakness for them. They're not being forced by LEGO, they signed off on this, LEGO can't tell someone what they can and can't do with their own IP (if it was up to LEGO they would have put this game on XBox too, which obviously Sony said no to).
If you don't get kids today when they're 8 or 9 there's a real chance you'll never have them when they're 16-25 either, they'll continue to play on Nintendo and mobile platforms. It's not 2002 anymore where there's societal/pop cultural pressure to "put away the Mario Kart and play Gran Turismo instead!" working for Sony. Today the way kids are raised it's very likely that mobile is their most played platform through childhood with a Switch as their gaming device for deeper experiences. The whole "well surely they have to graduate to a console though at some point right?" ... the Switch becomes *that* console, not Playstation. They grew up with Mario/Pokemon/etc. and Nintendo offers them a console with physical buttons and modern-style games, so that takes care of that and they continue to like Mario/Pokemon/etc. into their teens/20s/30s.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 12 June 2024
