Sony Pushing Vita with Biggest Marketing Campaign in Company History
Sony has plenty of strengths, but marketing certainly isn’t one of them. Fortunately, the quality of their products have been able to speak for themselves in the past, but with the surging popularity of smart-phones threatening the future of the dedicated gaming handheld, Sony plans pull out the big guns to promote the PS Vita by spearheading the biggest marketing campaign they’ve ever had.
The company’s got a brand new slogan – “Never Stop Playing” – to accompany the launch of the device, which will be plastered on billboards, commercials and more. Additionally, Sony has stated that their target audience is individuals in their early 20s who play games regularly.
Vita senior director John Koller explained that the purpose of the device is for gamers “to feel engaged and still feel like they’re playing on a console.”
The marketing campaign itself is costing Sony $50 million and serves as “the largest platform launch in terms of marketing investment we’ve ever had” according to Koller.
22 Responses to “Sony Pushing Vita with Biggest Marketing Campaign in Company History”
$50 million…
Too bad it’s all going to waste considering how Vita will fall flat on its face upon its Western release.
Do Sony really expect me, and consumers in general, to shell out $50 for Uncharted on the go? At first I thought it was a joke, and then realized everything Sony are starting to do is becoming a joke.
says who?
The vita will have a decent launch and by the holidays it will sell plenty to be a great year :-$
how do you value a game just by the fact that it’s portable? When it was the PSP that was one thing but the Vita games, at least Uncharted, are aiming to give us a console experience on the go…you can’t value the game based on the size of the screen it’s being played on.
While it’s true that you can’t value a game depending wether it’s on a home console or portable console, the fact that Sony has the bigger Vita games at $40-$50 is ridiculous and highly overpriced, no matter how epic the game is, even if it’s Uncharted.
Then don’t buy it? Things aren’t priced based on what you want to pay for it. Do you go to a car dealership and say that BMW is over priced lower the price to something I can afford. Its uncharted on the go , a new game in the uncharted series. Either pay 50 or wait for a price drop.
No, see that’s why there are so many negative things in the gaming industry now, because so many people just follow and are okay with everything that’s in the industry and if they aren’t okay with it they don’t anything about it. Prices on video games are too overpriced, it’s a fact, and it’s not just me saying it, developers and publishers and other gamers know it too. Although I really want a Vita I’m not going to buy one until it’s problems get fixed and one of those problems are it’s overpriced games.
PS Vita could be headed into trouble with it’s price of $250-$300, the fact you need a memory card no matter what and one isn’t included with every Vita, the high price of memory cards and the high price of it’s games. I also agree that Sony has been sucking in a lot of things, too many if you ask since a while now, more than a couple of years now. Having said that, no one knows how the Vita will do at launch, even though it has all those faults it could have a huge successful launch.
Hopefully they do a better job supporting the vita then they did with the psp.
I hope it isn’t too little too late. I’m an avid gamer and it took a ton of YouTube videos to convince me to buy a Vita at launch. The regular consumer won’t jump on it at launch when the ad campaign is really just starting and they didn’t have any time to put some money aside for it. Ads should have started at the beginning of the year at the latest and they should have been pumping our heads full of Vita slogans since then…I believe the Vita will sell but it will take a few months to get started because of the late start in marketing. Unfortunately, unlike the console versions, I have to say I look forward to the Call of Duty release on Vita just for the systems sake. If anything is going to sell this thing it will be Call of Duty.
I hope the same thing too. I think the Vita ads should make the people that aren’t avid gamers and are all up on the gaming sites want to get one. The avid gamers already know everything about Vita so they shouldn’t be targeted, sure you can throw in a few things in the ads that will make those avid gamers want one even more but those aren’t the people that Sony should target.
50m for marketing a whole platform doesn’t seem like much when some games use about that much alone, BF3, COD…
50 million is not a lot but keep in mind sonys financial problems
They r just tight on money
It’s Sony own faults by having made ridiculous, stupid decision after another, but PlayStation has been doing good so could take some of that money and invest in the marketing for another PlayStation product, PlayStation Vita.
Fact, very true, but it’s also a fact that it doesn’t matter how much you invest as long as the marketing campaign is epic and gets the job done. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Didn’t MicroSoft spend $500million on just promoting Kinect when it came out? LoL
+ Hopefully the sad ***** on the internet won’t be slagging it off to much(well it won’t be Vs a MicroSoft handheld so they might leave it alone but knowing those haters anything SONY & they will try & hurt it) :-/
I hope people realize there are a bunch of things that first came out about what the system could do and then information to counter that like the remote play capability. I cancelled my pre-order because I want to see how this all goes first. I thought it would be great to remote play my PS3 library while at home but it looks like the function is barely capable now. Even KZ3 that was demoed doesn’t even work. The odd thing is that it looks like a hack makes them all capable. Why would they restrict the function? Anyway maybe the whole system will be much cheaper in a few months. I’m in no real rush.
you have to remember that most reports that have come out so far on PS Vita functionality are based off of Japanese Vitas and some things aren’t going to be rolled out until Western Launch…Sony has made it clear that they haven’t made everything the Vita can do available yet but that will change when it releases here. I don’t know if we can expect full functionality as they promised by next Tuesday but I think there will be a lot of changes made between now and then. I fully expect another new firmware update for both the Vita and PS3 right around the 22nd.
Exactly! One feature I wanted for Vita which would have made me buy it at launch and would be one of the best features ever and I wouldn’t be surprised even so many people would have bought Vita just for that feature was being able to play any of your PS3 games on your Vita without the disc having to be in the PS3 and without the PS3 having to be in unplayable Remote Play mode, and than Sony announced this (except that the disc had to be in, but at least it’s a start) so I was happy but Vita launches and nothing.
PlayStations have so many potential for so many epic features but Sony instead of having them, they don’t and we know they can be added because of hacks. Another dumb Sony move. I’m in no rush to buy Vita until all it’s problems get fixed. I’m tired of all the crap in the video game industry and all the crap from Sony and Microsoft.
It’s almost like they read my comment from earlier today!
http://playstationlifestyle.net/2012/02/10/sony-we-should-probably-develop-less-games/comment-page-1/#comment-183792
Yeah, without pushing good marketing this thing is just floating in the toilet, waiting for the final flush. Why? Because no matter how good of a product it is, no matter what games are coming out, if people don’t know about it then all they’ll hear is “3DS! 3DS! It has no good games, but it exists so buy it!” and that’s what they’ll do.
At least they’ve got a solid lineup. They definitely can’t do what Nintendo did with the 3DS. The 3DS is a great system, but there wasn’t a good line-up. Sony’s got some great launch titles and some great titles over the coming months.
Better advertising from SONY? Yeah right. I’ll believe it when I see it.
It’s about time! Now if Sony could go all out when it comes to marketing their first party titles then they have money coming to the bank.