Sony Hoping to Take Playstation 3 “Towards a Younger Demographic”
By Yannick LeJacq | December 5, 2011 | News | 1 comment | Share
Sony’y European leader Jim Ryan revealed plans to direct more attention for their current generation console to younger gamers and family-oriented audiences in the coming year, an exclusive interview with OPM shows.
“You will probably see us taking the console more towards a slightly younger demographic – more family market,” Ryan told the magazine. ”The core gamer will absolutely not be neglected,” he qualified, assuring Playstation 3 users that “there’s going to be tons and tons of great stuff for the core gamer from our own studios, third parties.”
“But there’s some quite interesting stuff happening in a number of areas, which would allow us to open up a market that we accessed pretty successfully on PS1 and PS2, but we haven’t yet got to on PS3.”
The current generation of consoles has seen an stronger distinction being drawn between “casual” and “family-friendly” games and their “hardcore” counterparts, with Microsoft and Sony often taken to be the primary platforms to develop the latter type of games while the Nintendo Wii lead the pack in children’s games.
While this separation has been accepted as a general trend for the current generation of consoles, the Playstation 3 has still been home to successful children’s games such as the critically acclaimed and multiple award-winning Littlebigplanet series.
Microsoft has also been targeting a new audience with Kinect, its motion-sensor hardware add-on for the Xbox 360 that has been dominating console sales since its initial release last November following an enthusiastic marketing campaign by Microsoft emphasizing the console’s new warm and fuzzy side. Sony’s equivalent device, the Playstation Move, had a slower start but is steadily closing the sales gap with Microsoft.
Ryan also observed that games for younger audiences were successful on Sony’s previous Playstation consoles, in part because of the lower threshold such games established in terms of their price. “If you look back at the history on PS1/PS2,” Ryan continued, “the vast majority of the business that we did on both those platforms was done at sub-£129 price points.”
“We only just got to £199 in the UK a couple of months back, so you can see … there’s still a lot of PS3s potentially to be sold.”
i am curious to see how this will go because when they did a "more to the younger group" for Pokemon it was bad.