Nintendo is doing its thing: Getting traditionally non-gamers to pick up a Wii. And for Nintendo, that's been very, very successful. But Sony isn't interested in going after silver gamers. Oh, no. Sony is keen on going after PS2 gamers. Says the company's Scott Steinberg:
I think the reality is that we will win hands-down if we convert the PS2 owners to PS3. When we look at the total available market, we salivate at the notion of converting our existing PS2 universe. Every million units we drop into the PS2 is an annuity that's going to pay out later on for PS3 upgrades, and we've got some interesting ideas on how to reach out to those PS2 owners in the US and convert them up. But I think the notion of that controller is a non-trivial point that you've brought up, that control and that familiarity is like comfort food — from my perspective, we lead, we don't follow. And as a brand, Nintendo's got their thing, and we're not trying to get the senior citizen group to get into gaming, we're looking to convert the PS2 owners and the tens of millions of installed base that were playing DVDs and playing games on their PS2, to now play Blu-ray movies and Blu-ray games with their PS3.
Hit the jump for more, including the always thrilling "ten year life cycle" line.
We would look at technology that helped enable that, as oppose to trying to iterate or be derivative off of somebody else's vision. Ten years — it goes back to our mantra of ten years. Technology that's associated with the PlayStation has to have future-proof qualities to it. I think that we're seeing, graphically, PS3 games starting to create some distance and some of the other competitors are going to feel that they're getting long in the tooth, looking quite dated, because they haven't created that ten-year vision from a horsepower standpoint. So we're all about looking at ways to keep that bar high, and from a peripheral standpoint the Blu-ray remote helps people get in and out of their digital media, but we'd never consider iterating off of existing competitive technology — because we think that's a fad and that's not the way we approach product development. It's not the way we approach the marketing or the branding of PlayStation.
You know, if they knew the PS3 was going to be a ten-year product, I kinda wish they would've designed the outer case as a dust magnet. That wasn't very forward thinking!
Scott Steinberg - Part Two [GamesIndustry]