Sony were once the company everyone loved and loathed. Market leaders in product innovation and leading in several areas. Dominating the games industry and raking in the big profits. Since these golden years they have haemorrhaged more than $10billion in six years. To try and turn this around they are betting on the PlayStation Network.
In a move similar to that of the Xbox One, Sony plan to use their PlayStation 4 to take over all your content needs. According to senior officials speaking off record to Reuters, they will be offering social media, movies and music as well as games. If Sony get this in place, they plan to rake in more than $1billion dollars annually.
Content Consumption
Sony already have these types of services that are pushed with their mobiles, so this will simply be a case of wrapping them all together in a package suitable to be used with PlayStation Network. The hardest part will be convincing users to switch from other services.
“In the past there was a time when they (Sony) were all over the place and went after everything, but zeroing in first on game users is effective, the company’s next progress report will come with its first-quarter earnings on July 31. – Atsushi Osanai, Professor at Waseda University’s.
Captive Audience
Sony will certainly be hoping that established users of the network will adopt consuming content from their PlayStation. They have 52 million active users, but this pales in comparison to 800 million iTunes users. Â However many may already be signed up to other services. Doing so right from their PlayStation dashboard through services such as Netflix.
The aim may be that Sony charge a premium for the currently free service, but include streaming services. Having sold 8.7 million PlayStations compared to 4 million Xbox consoles. The 20 year old console is still going strong. Attracting users to jump to the PlayStation from the Xbox would make this service more appealing as Microsoft currently charge $40 a year to use the Xbox Live service.
However users are not dropping the PlayStation in favour of another console now. They are dropping console gaming altogether. Many are adopting smartphone and mobile gaming that better fits in with modern lifestyles. Clearly a worry for a company that still generates 90% of its income from Gaming.
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Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
