Tech Stuff
Playstation Missing Targets
- Details
- Last Updated on Saturday, 07 April 2012 00:11
- Written by MrB
Why Sony is failing at delivering digital content to the herd
And why their shareholders should be concerned
As I sat in the lounge with friends the other day it dawned on me why Sony is failing to hit its targets delivering digital content. There we were, a room of conservative thirty somethings and the Playstation screen aglow. It was confronting us with a splash designed to entice us into watching a movie. What did Sony use to entice us? The horrific image of Twilight, Final Destination 5, Higher Ground and something called Immortals.
I looked around the room and gestured as to whether any of these appealed. I received only laughter back. Sony had totally missed the mark and I have since noticed, it consistently does. It misses it in the suggested games too. On my own Playstation I had to dig well into the store to find something suited to my interests.
The user in question earlier was a mid-30's female with a HDD full of racing and sports games, a quite benign website history of sport, weather and news and movie history dominated by mild mainstream action and comedy. So Sony suggests this user might want to play a game of Max Payne or maybe watch some teeny vampire trash or partake in a medieval blood-something tournament. Crazy.
There is no excuse for it. They may not know everything about you in unnerving detail like we've come to expect from Google, but they are missing basic demographics. They DO know how old their users are, what movies they've watched before, what games they have installed and the sort of website's they visit (through the PS3). This is assuming the user hasn't additionally given Sony more details in the online registration. If the user has linked their Facebook account then they should know a lot more.
If Sony is going to stay at the top of the pile into the future it will not be able to rely on hardware alone. It is going to have to get people buying its digital content too and this means targeting properly. It's obviously a fine line between privacy invasion and tailoring content but Sony is way off.
