Sony Bringing in Foreign Consumers with ‘Gamer Kits’
Recently, the fine folks at Sony Computer Entertainment America hosted their annual Destination PlayStation event with an outing in Cabo del Sol, Mexico this year for Latin America. Despite lagging sales of the now 10-year-old original PlayStation 2 home entertainment console, it is clear that Sony has no intent to pull the plug on the PS2. In fact, SCEA is looking to use their old to churn out gold gamers with their latest announcement for Central and South America.
Dubbed the “Gamer Kit”, Sony is using the PS2 and PSP systems to convert Latino Americans to the ‘PlayStation LifeStyle‘. Both the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable “Gamer Kits” contain everything an aspiring gamer needs to get into the wonderful world of PlayStation. Who knows? Maybe the PS2 and PSP starter kits will serve as a gateway for adopters to dive into the PlayStation 3.
Launching next month in August, the PlayStation 2 gamer kit will come complete with a PS2 system, two DualShock 2 controllers, an 8MB Memory Card, and to top it all off, three of the best PS2 games available. Sticking true to its portable nature, the PSP on the other hand will come bundled with a PSP handheld device, travelers case, and a similarly chosen set of three titles. In any case, though, Sony is clearly focusing on getting the PlayStation attachment rate out there by granting more support in regions like Canada to even releasing the latest hardware in a more timely manner such as the PlayStation Move in India.
11 Responses to “Sony Bringing in Foreign Consumers with ‘Gamer Kits’”
hope for the mexicana’s sake they aren’t psp go’s. wakka wakka. this is a good start to sink their brand in foreign lands, i suppose. wonder what the going rate for a ps2 kit will be? maybe sony should consider doing this in poorer inner city areas in the US as well. maybe even arizona…..
oh come on, really sony? PS2?? are you serious?
hi PSLS, i’m from Uruguay (south america), and the sony brand is very well known and established here (not officially of course), i (like a many people here) have a PS3, we pay like $550 for a PS3 slim (my brother lives in Miami so he bought mine in the US and brought it to me, otherwise i could never got one at this price), i pay $80 for new games, i buy them in the black market, if you go to gamestop a new game costs like $160, it’s a joke, so instead of buying a xbox (like most of people here, pirate games are a huge advantage), we pay a lot of money because we believe the PS3 is better, and we get 0 support, 0 recognition, basically we don’t exist to sony
so, sony, listen up, we don’t need PS2′s gamer kits, we need support for the PS3! we don’t even have the option to create an uruguayan account, i have an argentinian account, and it doesn’t have a store, so for example i can’t suscribe to PSN+, i emailed sony to ask if they could change my account location to USA so i could have the store and suscribe to PSN+ and they said they can’t do that, i guess they don’t want my money
@ pLiDeX_uy why don’t you just make a NA (US) account on your ps3 yourself? its not that hard to do, if you need address info just ask or google McDonalds in the US and use their address information. most ps3 owners have at least a NA, JP and EU account to peruse the various stores and Home regions.
hello …
OT:
@ pLiDeX_uy – I totally agree with you…
When i saw the title, i 1st thought, what SONY will recognize the ‘small market’ !? in other countries !!!
but no. it may look a good move, but i think they’d better consider the other part of the world, for the big markets don’t do the worldwide sale alone.
Like fo pLiDeX_uy – consoles & games cost so much in Mauritius that piracy was at it’s apogee some times ago & the PC is the main gaming machine.
We do have SONY representative, but they don’t even know anything about the services, MU may be an island but also recognized to form part of Africa, yet still no link-up, no support.
We are now @ least 200+ owners of PS3 of a population of 1.2 Million, i know it’s not much, but everyday we see people going for the machine,
I myself have more than 30 games, half from PSN & still buying & having huge wish lists in online store. I even spend money on other items like themes, OST, HOME items.
In a country where the Xbox is pirated & having among my friends 4 PS3 owners against 2 Xbox & maybe 1 or 2 all platform owners do show how popular the big behemoth is.
Fortunately the games aren’t that expensive, well we still do have online shops that delivers to your paradise, but with no legislation on multimedia content, it’s normal that our games come from all zones & so we do need a global PSN account or have 1 in each & every zone.
if SONY would consider @ least the emerging gaming market (Mauritius is a developing country way ahead of expectations, the last 10 years proved it), just do a combine ‘Other Countries’ PSN Zone that will allow us to use other means of payment, why not go with an online service similar to paypal that accepts all credit cards (huh,not after thinking no, i’ll ruin myself LOL) …
Give us support, we do buy your products … in MU SONY may be the top 3 leading brand, so i sure hope someday somehow they will hear our cries… let us spend more of our money in what we want!
I want PSN+ & ready to pay even 100$ / year for this … but will never do it as long as i have unofficial accounts….
Sorry for long post & for being a bit OT.
BOT:
It’s cool but i do feel like such zones already know what PS3 means & they don’t need old stuffs.
SONY better work to appeal to foreign market, for people having nothing to lose go always the other side of the river. That’s why the xbox is modded by default in my country for XBL isn’t available at all.
cheers!
Sony should sort these people out…… Full respect to all those who are sticking with the ps3 in these regions!!!!!!!
@pLiDeX_uy – Dude, buy your stuff from Amazon.com. They ship to all of Latin America:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_navbox_596184_tips?nodeId=596202
@vesra
i have a US account for downloading the demos, the problem is that PSN+ it’s attached to your account, not the system, right? so i’d have to start using that account instead of mine and i would “lose” all the trophies that i have in my original account (i won’t lose them, but if i start using another account is like they don’t exist anymore for me), so it would be a better solution if they could just change the location of my account, i don’t understand what’s the problem with doing that
@JackC8
it’s not that easy, if i buy a game the customs charge me 60% of taxes, so it’s more expensive than buying it here in the “black market”, there’s people that buy old games from ebay (the ones that cost like $30) and if they get lucky the game passes trough the customs without paying taxes, but i’m not complaining about the prices, it’s the downside of living in a third world country, i just want to have at least the option to play as uruguayan, not american, not argentinian, it cant be so difficult to add another country to the list, right?
The most important thing of all is the official Sony support. I live in Latin America too, I bought my PS3 from USA, so that means ZERO warranty for me, and I can’t get any official tech support here (Dominican Republic) either. My first PS3 YLOD’ed after exactly 2 years, I couldn’t do much but to strip out the good parts left like the lens and hard drive and trash the rest. Many other PS3 owners I know got deffective blu-ray lens and when something wrong like that happens your best option ($$$) around here is to trust it to some “streetwise technician” you may know of to fix your PS3 without any kind of warranty. And of course Amazon gets all my money for new games, buying new games from stores here is for the wealthy/ignorant or price-unconcious type of people, hell they were selling the GOW collection at full price (here that’s around $90) lol screw them!
@pLiDeX_uy hope you see this before the post disappears from the front page. Plus is tied to the account on the system it was bought on. i have a plus account and any content i get through plus i can use on any account on my system, not just the plus account. this includes dlc and the rest. but not avatars, those are tied to the account that downloaded them. also note, any dlc you do download through any other region will not work for games you got in your region. say, you bought resistance 2, but got the dlc discounted through a NA region plus account, chances are that dlc won’t work for your game, unless (as you stated) your brother bought the game here in the US and shipped it to you there. the games are not region locked, but the DLC is. so, if you got a US plus account, you could then play those games on your regular account and earn the trophies there. this is exactly what my brother in germany is doing. since his main german account got stolen and sony refuses to reset it for him.
about the official support, it would be more than awesome, but at least here i don’t see it coming in the near future
@vesra
well thank you, that was helpful, so the only thing that i couldn’t use with my old account is the avatars? i don’t care so much about the avatars so thats’s a great tip
so let me see if i understood this, the only important thing about the regions is that the game must be from the same region than the DLC? all the games i buy are from NA region, so that’s not a problem, i wanted to buy the addon of bad company 2 but i thought that it wouldn’t work with my account but now i know
thanks a lot!
@pLiDeX_uy not a problem. have any other questions add me on psn. ID is vesra