Sony Play station has been one of the most successful products of the century. Since the release of the first Play Station in December 1993, Sony has released three subsequent Play Stations with great success. Sony released the original play station in December 1993, and sold more than 70 million play stations worldwide by the time Play Station 2 was released in 2000 (USA Today, 2014). Play Station 2 sold more than 155 million by the time it was discontinued in December 2012 (USA Today, 2014). Sony released Play Station 3 in 2006, and had sold 80 million units by the end of 2013 (USA Today, 2014). Play Station 4 is the latest generation that was released in November 2013 and had sold over 36 million units by the end of December 2015 (James & Rivington, 2016).
PS4 gaming console targets gaming fans across the world and is sold and distributed worldwide in retail shops and f online stores. The main competitor for PS4 is the Microsoft Xbox One. However, PS4 is far more powerful than Xbox and has a strong appeal to gamers. PS has developed loyalty from gamers by sticking to providing a great gaming experience unlike Xbox One that tried to integrate media in their consoles (James & Rivington, 2016).
The PS4 is the most powerful game console in the market. The PS4 has a single-chip processor that combines a 1.84 teraflop GPU with an eight core x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU, has excellent graphics, and the DualShock 4 offers better control than the DualShock 3 (James & Rivington, 2016). The PS4 has an 8GB GDDR5 RAM and a 500GB hard drive (James & Rivington, 2016). Sony claims that the new PS4 performance is ten times better than PS3. Another noteworthy feature is Share Play. Share Play allows players to let friends take over the control of the game they are playing, invite them to play, and watch their in-game progress (James & Rivington, 2016).The share Play allows the players to record parts of their games and share in the social media (James & Rivington, 2016).
The Levitt’s concentric circles below identify the factors that make the PS4 special.
Generic product
Expected product
D Augment product
Potential Product
Generic product
The generic features of a product are the fundamental features of a product that a business is selling. PS4 generic product is a home video gaming console providing players with a great gaming experience. The PS4 generic features include:
A fast processor, PS4 comes with a single-chip processor that combines a 1.84 teraflop GPU with an eight core 86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU
A RAM, PS4 comes with a super fast 8GB GDDR5 RAM
A hard disk with sufficient space, PS4 comes with a 500Gb or 1TB hard disk
A controller, PS4 comes with a DualShock 4 controller
Power cable, HDMI cable, and USB cable
A variety of games
Without these basic features, the PS4 would not be a gaming console. Therefore, every gaming console must at the minimum have these features.
Expected product
These are the features that the customer expects from the PS4. Since PS4 succeeded PS3, customers would expect the PS4 to be better than PS3 in the following ways:
More silent, PS4 is more quite than PS3 even when playing some high-level games (James & Rivington, 2016)
A better controller, the DualShock 4 controller has a bigger touch screen at the center of the controller than the DualShock 3, giving the player better control and user interface (UI) (James & Rivington, 2016)
Better performance, the PS4 has an eight-core AMD Jaguar CPU with a maximum speed of 2.7GHZ, and an 8GB super fast GDDR5 RAM making it almost ten times as powerful as the PS3 that had a 3.2GHZ single-core CPU, and 256 MB of DDR3 RAM (James & Rivington, 2016)
Multiplayer, PS4 has a light bar on each controller that identifies each player by four different colors blue, green, red or purple, allowing for easy identification of each player (James & Rivington, 2016).
These are some of the features that make PS4 superior to PS3.
Augment product
These are features that go beyond the customer expectations. PS4 surpassed customer expectations by having the following features. These are the features that give PS4 a competitive advantage over its competitors such as Microsoft Xbox One. These features include:
Share Play allows the player to share his game with his friends, as well as sharing it on social media. The share Play features allows the player to play with their friends as though they were all sitting in the same couch, what Sony calls the virtual couch (James & Rivington, 2016). This features allows players to stream games online
Exclusive games, PS4 has better collection of exclusive games than its competitors. PS4 provides its players with at least three games out of the six games offered each month, most of the games are exclusive to PS(James & Rivington, 2016)
Better graphics that make the gaming experience look all too real
The Share Play and the exclusive games have surpassed the customers’ expectations giving PS4 a competitive advantage over its main rival Xbox One. As at the end of 2015, Xbox One had sold about 20 million consoles (James & Rivington, 2016).
Potential Product
These are potential features that could be incorporated in a product in order to make it more competitive. PS5 may consider including some or all of the following features:
Eliminating the CD drive, since players can be able to stream the games online and there has been such an explosive growth of the internet the CD drive may be an unnecessary feature
Allow for cross-platform sharing, while pS4 has made big strides with the Share Play, the PS5 may consider adding more platforms such as developing a mobile phone version of their games
The future of gaming may move to the cloud and making consoles may become unnecessary (James & Rivington, 2016).Sony may want to consider the possibility of developing a cloud so that players with an internet can access them.
These features are worth considering in deciding the future of gaming. There might be a significant departure from the past where Sony developed game consoles and might instead decide to create a gaming cloud to allow gamers to play online. Sony Play Station is one of the most successful products of the century, and with better insights, and more innovation Sony Play Stations are likely to be successful even in the future.
References
James, D., & Rivington, J. (2016). Sony PS4 review. TechRadar. Retrieved 24 March 2016, from
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/gaming/games-consoles/sony-ps4-1131803/review
USA Today,. (2016). 10 best-selling products of all time. USA TODAY. Retrieved 24 March
2016, from http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/05/18/24-7-wall-st-the-best-selling-products-of-all-time/9223465/
