Sony Seriously Thinking About Charging for PSN

Posted on 04. Feb, 2010 by Freak_c in News, PSN Network

The news about Sony starting to look at making the PSN a paid for service started late last year, and has upset many PSN users. The strange thing is that a free PSN is one of Sony’s best marketing tools. In an interesting interview with IGN and Sony’s VP of Marketing Peter Dille, this topic was brought up and Dille did mention that Sony are “actively thinking about it.” The company has no announcement to offer while it tries to figure out “the best way to approach” any potential changes. Read below some of the highlights or head on over for the full interview.

IGN: Now that you’ve launched the new PS3, you’ve done a 180 and gone in a completely different direction with these very well-made, very funny ads. What prompted the change?

Peter Dille: Deutsch LA is the agency responsible for the new ads. They weren’t our ad agency for the initial campaign that we just spoke of. We’d been with our old agency for many, many years and I think oftentimes, clients and agencies — after great partnerships of more than a decade — decide to see other people and make a change. Deutsch came in and, frankly, what I was looking for was a campaign that really encapsulated everything the PS3 can do. It became very clear both from our own observation and a lot of market research that because of how powerful the PS3 was and is, it’s really kind of impossible to encapsulate everything it can do in one 30-second ad. So what we were looking for was an ongoing campaign. We wanted to have a conversation with consumers. We wanted to reestablish the PlayStation’s brand mojo, if you will. The brand has always been one that people have a special place in their heart for and it wasn’t foreboding; it was welcoming, open and funny. We’ve got a long history of ads like that and that was a big part of what we were looking for. Really harkening back to that PS2 brand that was quite frankly ubiquitous.

We came up with this whole ‘It only does everything’ campaign and the whole Kevin Butler effort not accidentally. Because this was a campaign that was incredibly well researched. We had this idea right under our nose because we had used Kevin Butler with the MLB launch. The agency came back and said, “We think we’ve got something here. We can work with a spokesperson like Kevin to communicate everything the PS3 can do and have a conversation with consumers.” There were a lot of misunderstandings about what the PS3 could do. I’ll go back to the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. People didn’t know what Blu-ray was. People didn’t know what this powerful machine was all about. And we needed a campaign that could kind of walk people through it step by step. So very literally we have a campaign where consumers are contacting and asking us very specific questions about what the PS3 can do and Kevin Butler is our ultimate answer-man who not only addresses the question but has a lot of fun doing it.

We think that combined with the tagline of ‘It only does everything,’ it really is something that crystalizes the message. It’s been tremendously successful. Consumers love it. It’s great to hear people like you guys love it. And the results are really in the sales because it’s really been flying since this coincided in September with the launch of the new PS3.

IGN: And you guys have more ads like these planned throughout the year?

Peter Dille: Yeah. You may have seen — we just launched one for MAG. So that’s out there now. From my perspective, this is a campaign that has a lot of life left it in and a lot of legs. We love the campaign and we love what it’s doing for the PS3. Frankly, ‘It only does everything’ is kind of a future proof message in and of itself. We talked about future proof technology and 10-year life cycles. And if you think about what’s on the rise for PS3 with motion-controlled gaming, that fits right into this positioning that ‘It only does everything.’ ‘It only does everything’ means everything it does up until today, but when motion control comes onto the scene, the message ties directly into that type of functionality as well. You can expect to see Kevin Butler inject a lot of life into the PlayStation brand between now and the rest of the year.

IGN: What would you say is Sony’s biggest win so far?

Peter Dille: I think the biggest win is just the trajectory that the product is on. We talk about the 10-year life cycle. I think sometimes the press maybe thinks it’s a talking point that Julie [Han, corporate communications, SCEA -- also present for this interview] makes me say. That’s not the case. It’s something that we believe in. We’ve done it twice already with PS1 and PS2. We’ve talked about it. Even going back to the launch of the PS3, we kind of reminded people: it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And at this point we’re at 31 million units worldwide, 11 million here in the U.S. and I think that we’ve got the product to a point where the manufacturing efficiencies are in place and the volumes so that we can get the price down to where it is today at a point where consumers are responding to. It’s resonating like never before. We’re well on the way to where we want to be on the platform. We’ve got the software support from a first-party perspective. The third-parties are making some great games. We’re off to the races.

I think the PlayStation Network has also grown into its own. We’re up to 40 million registered users worldwide on the PlayStation Network.

There is nothing but momentum behind the PS3 at this point. I could go on and on, but you’ll probably want me to shut up at some point. You know, we’ve got two consecutive years where the Game of the Year for the category is on the PS3 platform. Of course, Uncharted 2 and last year it was LittleBigPlanet. Our first-party studios are hitting it out of the park. We just shipped MAG. We’re about to ship God of War [3], which is going to just completely blow people away and be a big driver for the platform. We’ve got GT5 coming later this year. Everyone is just extremely excited about what’s going on with PS3.

IGN: And what would you say is your biggest failure?

Peter Dille: Well, it’s not a failure in that it was fatal, but it’s well-documented that we didn’t have as smooth a launch as we would have liked to. I think we primed the pump with a lot of interest in the platform. People can point to the ads and whatnot. We talked about that. I think the shortcoming was getting a lot of people whipped up and having them wait in line and then only having a very, very limited amount of hardware supply globally, which meant that we had a kind of start and stop effect with our launch, which is hard to recover from. It was a speed bump that we had to overcome and we overcame it.

IGN: What can we look forward to this year with regard to PSN improvements?

Peter Dille: Well, I don’t want to make any announcements that we’re not ready to make, but I would say the continued enhancement of all the services, making it more user friendly, addressing UI — there’s some cool stuff that I’ve seen in the works that hopefully we’ll be able to talk about a little bit more and show you guys and the community. I think original programming is another goal. We’ve put our toe in that for a while now with programs like Qore and Pulse, and you probably know we’re going to be launching an exclusive program on the PlayStation Network called The Tester. It’s reality TV meets gaming, where we’re actually going to put a bunch of folks through the paces and decide who gets to have a job here as a tester, which is for these guys a dream job. It’s a lot of fun and something that you might see on TV. It’s that type of original programming that helps differentiate the platform and helps tip the balance to people making a decision to get on board with PlayStation versus the competition because they can get things here they can’t get anywhere else. So we want to build a best-in-class service with PlayStation Network and make improvements across the board.

We haven’t even touched on all the great games that you can find on the PlayStation Network. If you’re a gamer and you have a PS3, it’s probably the biggest driver. Oftentimes in interviews like these, we talk about Uncharted, LittleBigPlanet and God of War and we forget about all the really great gaming content that’s coming out on PlayStation Network, about half of which is exclusive to our platform. Games like Flower, PixelJunk or Fat Princess — these are award-winning games in their own right. People go to trade shows and vote them as best of show. They’re incredibly creative, innovative and very popular, and unfortunately they sometimes fly under the radar because PS3 can do so much that we sometimes run out of time in interviews talking about it. But for gamers it’s a big driver and it’s why they’re excited about the PlayStation Network, so you’re going to see a lot more of that as well.

IGN: One of the questions our readers really wanted to ask was, why can’t we download more PS1 and especially PS2 games on PSN?

Peter Dille: It’s a great question. We’re working really hard on it. We’re pushing the third-party community and evangelizing this as a terrific opportunity both commercially as well as from a brand perspective to keep people interested in some of these older IPs [intellectual properties]. Final Fantasy VIII was the top downloaded game in December — a real testament to your readers’ questions, you know, that this stuff has an audience. From our side, we’re going through our own studio organization and trying to make sure all these old games are out there so that we can lead by example, but we’re also communicating with all the third-parties about the success of the Final Fantasy games, and other PS1 and PS2 classics. By all means, I think people can look for more of that because once the third-parties see how this works, it’s just found money. There’s not a whole lot of work that has to go into it and once we can get it up on the network, it finds an audience pretty quickly.

IGN: So you do think that PS3 will overtake Xbox 360 in sales at some point, then?

Peter Dille: Yeah, we do. I’m confident we’ll be around in 10 years and I can say that because we’ve done it twice. PS3 will be around in 10 years and probably much longer than that. I have my own opinion, but I’ll ask you the question. Do you think the 360 will be around in 10 years?