Over the last 5 months Sony has been very aggressive in attempting to retake the market sharre it has lost. Considering PS2 dominance and PSP at least competing, Solny had lost a lot of ground. Thus at E3 2009, Sony announced the PSP GO. Later in August of 2009, Sony announced a price cut for the PS3 skus and a new 120 gb PS3 slim. Sony also released big brand software for each such as Gran Turismo PSP, LittleBigPlanet PSP, and Jak and Daxter on the PSP and Uncharted 2 and Ratchet and Clank 2 for the PS3.
Now that we have entered December, both have had lots of time to discuss and analyze. On the one hand PS3 is doing amazing. It has turned its situation around in every territory to overtake immediate competition of 360 and even sometimes the market leader. However, on the other hand, PSP Go has failed to realize any significant sales or return the system to any competitive form. It can even be argued that it is in worse shape now than it was a year ago. The question is, with such a successful move in one area, why such a marketing disaster in the other. Let's go over the situation.
There are a few differences between the situation but just some points of interest. First, a $300 pricetag for the PS3 has been huge. The PS3 is of a great value system of being a high quality gaming product along with a high quality blu-ray player. As HD and Blu-Ray become more popular, the addition of the PS3 as an entertainment system is surely going up in value. Although Sony will have to take some losses from this as a company it surely is having a positive effect sales wise. The PSP GO on the other hand had a mark up in price with its new features and design compared to the old PSP. A $250 pricetag (more expensive than DS Lite, DSi, Wii, and 360) is surely a hard sell considering the functions you get aren't really much to desire especially considering you could get an iphone for a little more or a gaming system with extra features for $170 on PSP 3000 or DSi.
Second point of interest is aggressiveness of advertising. Since the PS3 pricedrop, there has been a strong and powerful marketing campaign from Sony. Everyone knows the commercials and they are quite funny while still getting the message across. They are consisten and prolific on the channels and are really being shown to the masses. This is a more aggressive campaign than the Wii or 360 and it is showing. However, with the PSP it almost seems like this is nonexistent. GT PSP and LBP PSP had quite a marketing campaign but the focus was never on also pushing the PSP GO. Actually it might almost seem they didn't want it to be pushed. Marketing of the PSP Go had been poor from the get go as a release date was only made "known popularly" a few weeks before it actually came out. Little advertising before that was seen. It went straight from E3 to release almost.
Final point of interest is just the success of software. PS3 has had numerous amounts of success in software beforehand and its big titles releasing near the pricecut/slim have continued that trend. Uncharted 2 is already one of the most critically acclaimed games ever and one of PS3's best selling games. PSP on the other hand has seen failure after failure with its software releases and its big hits have been no different. Although some are doing well due to bundles, its hard to argue that they would have done welll on their own merit. The big one, GT PSP, also came to subpar reviews and could almost be seen as a game made simply to put the brand out.
Going over everything with PS3 and PSP, it is easy to see a trend. Sony has treated them completely different over these last few months when they were trying to argue for both of their staying power. They had confidence, money, and hardwork behind the PS3 and its Slim while they had almost none of this behind the PSP and it's new PSP Go. PS3 Slim, therefore, has become a huge success and even competing with the market leader Wii, while the PSP Go (I'm finally ready to say it) a complete and total commercial failure and potentially one of Sony's worst.
The question is why? What changed or what is different? I think first and foremost, is the different situations. PS3 had still been going moderately strong and wasn't being completely dominated. It's market leader only had a plurality (a strong one though) and it's second place although at times dominating was never putting it completely out of competition. For the most part it wasn't a PS2 situation. However, with PSP's market contender, DS has almost 70% of the market share and was energized with a successful launch of a DSi.
However, I still think the majority of what happened, it simply the lack of faith from Sony in their handheld competitor. PS3 may have been down but Sony had confidence in the brand around the world and treated it as such. With PSP, it almost seems they have given up and PSP Go was just something they had been working on if PSP was still competiting and when it wasn't they just tossed it out there. I mean it's easy to notice that PSP Go could have been successful because Nintendo tried something very similar in March 2009 with the DSi. Although the situation isn't a perfect comparison, it does show that you can release a more expensive, even somewhat limiting system, to strong success. PSP Go was none of this and therefore it sold poorly.
In conclusion, Sony has really shown some great and disturbing things. On the one hadn they showed they have the ability to jump out of nowhere and achieve success and on the other hand have shown they have they have the ability to release one of the biggest commercial and ideological flops in gaming history. It's quite possible that Sony still isn't ready to compete on 2 fronts in the gaming industry as they have not been able to keep up with their competitor. We'll see great things with PS3 into 2010 and strong competition with its eventual PS4. Sony, however, needs to carefully look over their handheld competitor as they think about PSP 2 or Sony handheld 2. I wouldn't go as far to say to not try another time in the market, but they need to take a lesson from themselves with the case of PS3: the competition isn't going to hand you a victory on a silver platter. You either fight for it or you move aside.
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