At the start of its press conference at Cologne’s Gamescom this year a press event usually reserved for the more esoteric game announcements, the weirder stuff, the kind of thing that wouldn’t really fit in at E3 Sony kicked things off by announcing that 10 million PlayStation 4s were now nestled under televisions in homes across the world.
That’s really a lot of PS4s. So many, in fact, that Sony’s executives aren’t entirely sure who’s been buying them. In interviews later on, Shuhei Yoshida admitted to feeling rather nervous about the console’s success, because nobody could figure out who these 10 million people actually were. Was it all ‘core gamers’? Was it families?
Lapsed game-players drawn back in by the PS4 hype?Whoever these people are, I’ll bet you that a vast number of them are European. Europe has always been something of a Sony stronghold, especially during the PS1 and PS2 days, but over the last eight years, the Xbox 360 bit a huge chunk out of Sony’s market share. To pick one example: at its height, PS2 had 80% of the videogame market share in the UK; PS3’s share wasn’t even 30%. In mainland Europe, PlayStation remained
more popular, but going into PS4’s launch, Sony had a lot of ground to make up.
euro smash
These 10 million sales prove that it’s been done. At the time of writing, the Xbox One still hasn’t even been released across much of Europe (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and Switzerland, to be precise), and meanwhile Sony has been courting Europe aggressively. Its Gamescom show, full of beautiful Euro strangeness such as Michel Ancel’s Wild, Media Molecule’s Tearaway Unfolded and Ninja Theory’s Hellblade, painted the PS4 as a truly international console, while Xbox still struggles to get away from its sickly all-American image.
Sony could not have achieved this early success without winning over Europe.
By embracing local markets and languages from the offset, it has won a big lead over its rival, and maintaining an advantage is always less challenging than gaining one.