In a three-week study conducted prior to the release of God of War III, Nielsen did some research as to why gamers purchase consoles. In this specific instance, the PlayStation 3 was the console of interest. Researchers asked those “definitely or probably interested in acquiring the system in the next months to better understand the factors behind their purchase intent.”
The results that came back were rather surprising. With the popular ‘logic’ that consoles sell due to the games they play, one would have expected the game factor to be at the top of the list. When asked to rank the top 5 most important reasons (out of 10 possible choices), gamers aged 7 to 54 gave some surprising answers to say the least.
The top motivator turned out to be the Blu-ray capability. It's interesting to say the least, but not as surprising as one would think. PlayStation 3 at release was still one of the cheapest Blu Ray players available, enticing many people to opt towards the console. At almost four years since the PS3 release, 65% polled still had Blu-ray capability at the top of their list.
It would also seem that the recent price drop, mainly driven by a hit advertising campaign has really helped boost purchase motivation, taking second place at 63% of those polled. Other top motivators did include games, with the library of games available coming in at 62%. Another strong indicator of brand loyalty did show that polled individuals wanted to upgrade their existing PlayStation 2 systems, with the same 62% indicator.
Perhaps most surprising is that only 12% of respondents saw a single title as a motivating reason to purchase a PS3. The study was focused on the release of God of War III, one of the main contenders for Game of the Year. Of those who answered that their purchase was driven by a single game, they were asked to clarify which game was driving the purchase, and God of War III claimed a full third of the respondents as their “first choice game.”
Though games are still the reasons consoles exist, they appear not to be the only reason anymore. With rising concern on multimedia expansion for all consoles, it comes as no surprise that Sony made the right call going with Blu-ray. For all their initial losses, things seem to be picking up.
2 Comments
May 19, 2010
Just looking at that chart people buy a PS3 just to play movies? I think not.
What that chart does not show is that the basic idea of the PS3 is still actually games and by buying that game system that has BluRay I get to not buy another DVD player.
I know most people on this site know that, but I see so many news people and marketing people spin charts like that that many non-gamer industry types actually believe them.
(Spot on Ben, a great breakdown of industry data.)
May 24, 2010
When the PS2 was released one of its major selling points was that it was a DVD player as well as a game system. Many of my friends switched from Dreamcast to PS2 due to the DVD player. Now by the time the PS3 came out I was very happy with the PS1 and PS2. I was tempted to go Xbox 360 because they were out first. but they weren't thinking forward. No HDMI?, No Net surfing, No Hi Def format. They were in such a hurry to release ahead of everybody else they made an inferior system that had to keep upgrading to catch up. Now if you were one of the Xbox fans that purchased a Xbox core you got SDTV cables, no HDD and No wireless controllers. So I decided to stick with Playstation which had better specs. I'm glad I did.