Ten Ways for Sony’s Next Console to Beat the Wii Formula Part I

It’s that time again and everyone is hoping they will get everything they want on Christmas morning, but will Santa and his elves be able to pound out enough Wii to stuff everyone’s stocking this year? Everyone is trying to get their hands on a Wii and some of its popular games during this Christmas season, but amongst all the buzz around Nintendo’s console, Sony and its power-house gaming console has been given the silent treatment for its relatively disappointing performance to this day.

It has been a few years since all three of the next-generation game consoles has been on the marketing and there’s no doubt that each has appealed to a different group of audience; however, the Wii, to this day, still has the momentum to grab more market share, a fact that is clearly apparent this Christamas. What can Sony, Nintendo’s biggest competitor, do to regain confidence from its fans to boost its next console’s sales that will come out? We have given it some thoughts into this and have narrowed it down to ten fundamental steps.

1) Power Overwhelmed, Speed Undermined, Accuracy Blurred, Doom Insured

Speed and accuracy is the key to winning any fight, not power. As any gamer who has played any fighting game will tell you, that character who is able to deliver hits quickly and accurate is always more powerful than an enemy who is just sheer power. In the war between Nintendo and Sony, Sony’s muscle-bounded machine has lost simply because it lacked speed and accuracy.

You might argue that Sony has had a head start with launching its console before the Wii and it had fans from its previous console, the PS2, so Sony should have won, according to my logic. Sony has not accurately analyzed its target market with the PS3, since an intended user of the game system is a rich, loyal, and hardcore gamer between the ages of roughly 13-35. You and I might know someone who has one of the three qualities of a typical intended user of a PS3, but there are few gamers who have all these traits. As you can see, Sony designed a machine that clearly over-estimated its target market; thus, the PS3 only attracted a minor percentage of the gaming community, leaving many untapped gamers to look for an alternative next generation gaming experience else where.

As the saying goes, you got to hit your enemies hard and fast. PS3 has had a big head start in comparison to the Wii, yet during its reign as the supreme next gen game system on the market, the speed as which the games that followed the system could only be described as sluggish. Instead of launching familiar game sequel along with the launch of the system, Sony entered the market with just a few good hits that are targeted mostly at males who loves FPS, violence, and sports. Compared to the games on the Wii, the PS3 games have clearly missed out on a big group of potential gamers on its first year of launch.

Solution: A game system is only as good as its games and is one of the areas the Sony R&D team needs to invest some money on. We cannot be sure kind of control system Sony will include in its next console, but Sony must not launch its next system unless it has some popular game titles to launch with. Sony should build up a modest library of games, not based solely on only several types of games and next gen graphics, before doing the launch of the actual system. Don’t rush the process, but instead wait for the perfect moment to strike fast and accurately.