Nice article from Fast Company highlighting the evolution of the PlayStation. I was especially interested in getting some perspective on the gradual transition to digital that Sony (and the other major consoles) are making. Of course, there are still physical games that are being sold in stores, but digital downloads are huge players in the market with hundreds of millions in sales each month!
The whole shift to digital is important to note, because when we think about the current landscape of the learning video game, it is dominated by digital efforts such as Brainpop. And the future of the learning video game will likely be completely digital. So it’s good to follow how the entertainment-based video game industry plans to move forward with digital to perhaps gain some examples and best practices.
Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Shawn Layden had some words on the transition in the article:
“The transition from physical to digital is actually faster than any of our projections. We realized that there is a benefit to being able to download the game in your home, without getting in your car, driving to the store, bringing it back. Of course on PS3, it was faster to drive to the store than download it. So we fixed that problem. And now you can play while it’s downloading, which is one of the greatest innovations we brought to it.
What we didn’t factor in was the second level of convenience we are learning from people: they don’t want to get off of the sofa and put the disc in the machine. They would rather just have it on the hard drive and just go from game to Netflix to PlayStation Vue, go back to another game. I totally get it. I only download stuff now. That transition is happening super quickly.”
Here is the full article.
Marcus T. Wright 