Whether or not you remember it or were even aware of it, earlier this summer Sony launched a fairly silly ad campaign starring Marcus, a sassy kid who has had it up to here with games like Paper Toss [Free] for the iPhone. Sony released a few other videos starring Marcus as part of the “Step Your Game Up" campaign, but this was the video that started it all:
The basis of the video seems to be that Marcus is outraged that on the App Store you’re charged for a “fake version of a real game" despite the fact that Paper Toss, the game shown in the video, always has been and likely always will be free. After the initial surge of Marcus videos, the ad campaign seemed to die off, until this week when Sony released their next video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdPvVCbLY5c
The latest video highlights Sony’s PlayStation Network “$9.99 Favorites" section with five year old games like Twisted Metal: Head On and Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee. What they neglect to mention in this recent video is that new PSP games, such as Madden 11 which is available on the App Store for $7.99 sell for just as much as their physical media counterparts at $39.99. They also leave out the fact that if you own a PSP Go and are limited to downloaded games only, you will often need to wait for games to be released on the PlayStation Network after they’re released in stores, and sometimes they’re not even released for download at all.
Then if you add in Sony’s requirements of needing to be running the latest system software which can take hours to download and install to even browse the PlayStation Network store or that when you’re downloading a multi-gigabyte game on your PSP you can’t do anything with the system but wait for it to finish… I could go on and on. It should be interesting to see what Sony’s next move will be, as declining PSP sales along with the failure of the PSP Go seems to be driving them to desperate measures to try to regain a foothold on the mobile gaming market.
