Sony’s Senior Marketing Manager John Koller Interviewed
Article via Gameinformer:
Game Informer: Looking back on the last two years, what are your overall thoughts on the PSP?
John Koller: I’m going to set it up by year, because it’ll segue way nicely into what we’re looking at for this upcoming year. We’re very pleased with the PSP business here and it’s really fitting in perfectly with what we have set out with from the beginning. As we’ve talked about many times, the PSP doesn’t directly compete against any product really that’s out in the market right now, just due to its full feature set. So the onus came onto us at SCEA to market that appropriately, and also to place the correct content behind each of those buckets. So that’s really been over the past year our goal, to really focus on the content for not only for last year but also for this upcoming year and in years to come, to make sure there’s enough content efficiently and really perfectly placed behind each of those feature sets.
We have as the end of March there’s going to be 250 plus games available, so the game side of the PSP has been really well-received by developers and publishers. We talk to third parties quite a bit; they’re still very bullish on the PSP. Obviously, on the first party we’ve got a number of great titles coming out this year, as does the third party—including some exclusive titles from the third party for PSP—so the game side I think is very buttoned up. Over the last year, we added TivoToGo, the year prior we had Location Free TV for kind of a TV bucket.
The UMD business has been fairly steady. As many people know, some retailers decided to get out of the business, several have gotten back in the business—actually last holiday. They saw the growth potential, and in fact we have seen some growth there in that category, so there have been a number of more efficiently targeted releases, less of the outside of the target demo type movie content and more of the action and comedy that really resonates well. Music has shot up. Music in our latest research is actually the #2 use for the PSP behind single-player games and it kind of came as a surprise. We knew music was going to be important, but how quickly it shot up the ranks and people using the music functionality when they travel or even at home has been a nice surprise. And then obviously the Internet and some of the other areas that are growth areas for us I think we’re going to look at this year to try and promote. We also are going to try and expand our target audience this year. Since launch, we’ve been focused pretty heavily on the older more travel oriented consumers someone who we’ve called “urban nomads” but they are the ones taking subways to work, commuting, or taxis, planes, whatnot. And we’re going to start trending a little bit younger. We’re seeing a lot of sales coming from the teen group–13-17–in fact that’s our #1 owner group now for the PSP. We’re really going to focus a lot of our marketing efforts on that area this upcoming year.
GI: Do think Sony as a company has accomplished its goals with the PSP so far?
Koller: Yes. There’s a lot of other goals we have for it. We talk about it here as the cultural product that kind of resides between our living room console products–PS2-PS3. The goal from the beginning with the PSP was to always be able to take your entertainment with you. Whether it’s games or other content, we’ve really worked hard on the Remote Play functionality between the PS3 and PSP to allow you to take that other entertainment with you that you may have stored on your PS3. From the overall perspective, we’re very, very pleased. We’ve achieved our goals for where we want to be right now with the PSP. We also realize that there’s a lot of room to grow and there’s a lot of things we’re going to be adding this year.
This year is going to be the best PSP year thus far. There’s just a ton of great things coming. I can’t talk about all of them today, but it’s going to be a fantastic year for the PSP.
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