Manufacturer
The Xbox One/Playstation 4 debate has been quite intense over the past few months, with each manufacturer marketing their next generation consoles slightly differently. For example, Sony has all most exclusively marketed towards people who just want to play games on their new console, whereas Microsoft has aimed it’s marketing more towards families who want to use the new Xbox as more of a media hub for multiple forms of creative entertainment, such as games, movies and music. I believe that since most of the people who are interested in these consoles already are gamers, Sony has been most effective at spotting, and targeting, their intended audience. Below are two videos which I believe illustrate my point clearly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK6mdKzeR2E – Xbox One Advert
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dR28fXFDMI – PlayStation 4 Advert
As the videos show, the PlayStation advertises itself as “for the players”, almost categorically saying that it is a dedicated gaming system. Whereas the Xbox advertises itself with the sentence “All your entertainment, All in one”.
The audience classifications for each of these next generation consoles also vary quite a bit. For the PlayStation 4, the demographic is based more on young middle class male adults. This seems quite evident when watching adverts and gameplay trailers. The Xbox One demographic however, seems to be based on a slightly older and mixed gender demographic. I believe that this is showed by the fact that all of the people that are doing anything in the PlayStation adverts are young males, compared to the slightly older males and females in the Xbox adverts.
Much of the two psychographics seem to be similar. The main difference being that the PlayStation seems to be based more on people who want to use their next generation console almost exclusively for gaming, whereas the Xbox One seems to be based on people who wish to use their console as more of a home entertainment system to stream movies and TV, as well as games. This is demonstrated with the above adverts and text.
As for geographic classification, Sony seems more committed to bringing their consoles to more countries worldwide. For example, the PlayStation 4 will be released in 32 countries in November, compared to the 21 countries which the Xbox One will be released in the same month.
Game Publishers
Several games have been announced that will be exclusive to each of the next generation consoles. The most notable of which for PlayStation 4 being inFAMOUS: Second Son. The inFAMOUS games have always been exclusive to PlayStation consoles, and generally speaking received good reviews.
For the Xbox One, the most hyped exclusive game has probably been Ryse: Son Of Rome. As a new title, I believe that this attracted quite a lot of attention from people who were looking to expand what sort of games that they play.
I think that the publishers for each game have been quite successful in creating hype for their games, but in different ways. The publishers of inFAMOUS were able to create hype by bringing back an already established title that had a good track record. The Ryse publishers, however, created hype by marketing the game as something which hadn’t really been done before. I believe that each of these methods have worked for the titles that they have been used for.
Journalistic Media
There are countless creative media based review sites on the internet, many of them being Games Industry specific. Quite a few of them were able to get quick looks at the new consoles before release in some way or another. This allowed potential customers to see the technical specifications and multiple features before release of the consoles. Many websites initially reported the facts that were released with the official announcements by the console companies, Sony and Microsoft. This allowed people who hadn’t seen much about the consoles, but who frequented these games website to read up about the consoles in much more detail.
http://www.giantbomb.com/playstation-4/3045-146/ – PlayStation 4 announcement/quick look
http://www.giantbomb.com/xbox-one/3045-145/ – Xbox One announcement/quick look
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/game/3452022/xbox-one-vs-xbox-comparison-review/ – PlayStation 4/Xbox One comparison
I believe that for the most part, a lot of websites have tried their best to remain mostly impartial. There are some however that when reviewing the consoles, weigh up the pros and cons of them, and then judges as to which is the better console overall.
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/2013/12/11/xbox-one-ps4/index.html – Xbox One & PS4
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