Sony – D-Day

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First battle won, but at risk of losing the war.

• The changes that Sony is making to its gaming offering around PS4 are only about games rather than the overall ecosystem.
• Yakimura is the latest update for PS4 which will bring in some great new features for the gaming experience but nothing that improves the user interface.
• The ability to suspend and then resume games, 60 frames per second remote play and the ability to find Facebook friends who have a PSN account will all be included in the next update.
• At the same time, Sony’s efforts to bring smaller games to Android devices (and PSVita) called PlayStation Mobile will cease operations in September.
• On their own these are all sensible moves but together they indicate that Sony is no longer thinking about its assets collectively.
• The user experience on the PlayStation is badly in need of improvement.
• At the moment it is little more than a bare bones user interface that a user can use to load, purchase and launch games.
• If Sony wants users to do more with the console, it has to make the experience easy and fun to use.
• Easy and fun will encourage users to have a look around at what else is on offer before launching a game.
• This is the key to enticing users to do more with Sony other than just playing games.
• Furthermore, users would begin identifying with the user experience and would recognise and welcome it when it appears on other Sony devices.
• As it is today, the experience is bare bones at best and it is a relief to launch the game and leave it behind.
• The closure of PlayStation Mobile is in itself a good idea as it is losing money, but it is exactly the kind of cross device product that Sony needs to get right to make it in the ecosystem.
• The PlayStation gaming experience will be improved with this update, but beyond that it looks like no real progress will be made.
• PlayStation has won the first round in the battle against Microsoft, but the user experience on Xbox is so much more engaging that its users are far more likely to go beyond gaming and stay loyal to the platform.
• Furthermore, with Windows 10 there will be much greater parity across all of the devices that Microsoft offers making the whole cross device strategy much more of a reality.
• If users begin to value this, they may chose an Xbox next time around which could do Sony real damage.
• Sony has won the first battle but remains at risk of losing the war unless it begins to delight users in ways other than just playing games.