Japan: The Psychology of a Hardware Launch

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The no-marketing marketing blitzmasters have stood atop skyscrapers and sneezed toward the public face, and now stand waiting. This naturally coincides with hardware shortages and, eventually, availability. In an empty space of near radio-silence on the manufacturer's part, the system has earned thousands of loyal followers who have yet to purchase it.

This is all a very elementary way of looking at it; for years, game companies have been telling journalists at press conferences that it's software that makes a console sell. Usually, the only hardware manufacturers who don't say this seem to be the only ones who actually do it. Nintendo's DS was an ugly duckling that turned into a beautiful swan. The many colors of DS Lite (currently White, Black, Ice Blue, Navy, Pink) have accounted for the top three (and now five) "most-reserved" videogame items on Amazon.co.jp since March.

The DS exploded sales-wise because games naturally came into the world, and people wanted to show them to their friends, who then wanted to buy a DS. Without (presumably) ever once holding a meeting wherein businessmen preached to developers about capturing the casual market, they built the DS as though founding a university. Eventually, scholars with broad ideas showed up. Without (again, presumably) holding a meeting wherein they talked about letting the system spread to the people by word of mouth, it spread by word-of-mouth.

The Nintendo DS did not sell out at launch. I recall walking into a large electronics store a week after the launch and seeing plenty of units available. With the PSP, this was absolutely impossible. With the PS3, it will be impossible as well. Preorders for PS3 were officially sold out in all three stores I checked last night.

One has to wonder, as the 2,000-some readers of the Japanese Xbox 360 community do, if this launch is truly a "Beta advertising" scheme or a sign of actual desperation. For one thing, the PlayStation 3 isn't a portable unit. People aren't going to be carrying it on the train in a baby blanket, showing it off to other passengers. They're going to put it in their home and leave it there. They're going to think about it when they're not home. They're going to wish they were in its presence.

On the most basic level, the ideal consumer is one who buys a videogame console and all of its peripherals and software titles at launch, purchases every new peripheral or piece of software as they are released, and then keeps them locked up in a dark room (never checking to see if the product is defective), spending every moment of every day telling every person they come across that they love their newest purchase. Of course, people tend not to buy new videogames unless advertisers and marketers make the games look interesting; and advertisers and marketers can't make games look interesting unless the game developers make them look interesting, and game developers can't make games look interesting unless they have interesting concept materials to work with, and designers can't design interesting concepts unless they're talented -- and that's where the food chain becomes purely subjective.

Like Minorities

How did people come to know about the PS3 in the first place, then, if Sony isn't advertising it? How does anyone even know it exists? The short answer is "Duh: gamers." Sometimes the audience of a game magazine appears to be the entire world to gamers; sometimes, on a person-to-person basis, gamers are pulled out of their bubbles, and feel like minorities. The secret to marketing a huge product to a small group is to make them feel like they're in on a secret, yet to make the exclusive "them" feel like the whole world.

When dealing with videogames, specifically, it's about content. The launch is a crude idea -- it's almost heartless. Get the hardware out there! Slay as many consumers as you can! Only then can television commercials advertising new games pop up.