

It was when the business shifted from 2D to 3D, cartridges to discs, and went from being a nerdy pastime to a 'cool' one.

PlayStation steered into that nostalgia effectively back in 2014. Xbox 360 cemented Microsoft's place in gaming From Crash Bandicoot to Jurassic World, Spice Girls to Friends, just look at the gap between the originals and their hugely popular comebacks. We've written about this before, and you can see the trend in all forms of media. Reminiscing wistfully on childhoods can happen at any age, but you'll find it happens a lot for people in their 30s and 40s. There's no need to go all-in on nostalgia when there's plenty to talk about in the here and now.īut on top of that, Xbox has a bigger nostalgia moment to come.Ģ0 years is a bit of a sweet spot when it comes to looking back. It's just successfully launched Age of Empires 4 and Forza Horizon 5, to rapturous reviews, and is gearing up for its next mainline Halo game. In a Christmas where most major publishers have a smaller slate of titles than usual, Microsoft stands as the big exception. That shouldn't come as a surprise considering its line-up. What Xbox is doing this week, with its celebration livestream, special items and PR activity, isn't quite as ambitious as that. When it came to 20 years of PS1 in 2014, there were parties, marketing stunts, pop-up shops, special edition consoles and all sorts of PR activities. And the company spent a lot of marketing dollars on things like the PlayStation Memories campaign, featuring that excellent bedroom ad. Back then, PlayStation's first-party games line-up wasn't as strong as it is today.

Lots of companies do this (particularly Nintendo), but again it was a strategy Sony adopted to strong results at the launch of PS4. And that's something Xbox is doing this week with its 20th anniversary celebrations. It worked for PlayStation, and the sentiment around Xbox is certainly far stronger today than it was eight years ago.Īnother strategy that can work in generating affection for your brand amongst consumers is by steering into nostalgia. Even so, positioning yourself as 'for the gamer' is a proven strategy. And they have both made unpopular decisions for commercial reasons (they are businesses after all). Both companies are for gamers (they make games after all) and have done very positive things for its fans. "There's no need to go all-in on nostalgia when there's plenty to talk about in the here and now" But we believe, if you put the player first, that's the best thing for the industry and we're going to go do that." You don't get much more explicit than this quote: "For a lot of platforms, they might say they don't want to do cross-play, or I don't want to do back compat. The pitch is that Microsoft loves gamers more than anyone else, and that's why it's embracing cross-play, cross-platform, backwards compatibility, and Game Pass.

In our interview this week with Xbox exec Sarah Bond, she talks about being 'player centric' or 'player first' a total of nine times. The implication was clear: PlayStation is for gamers, Xbox is not.įast forward to today, and now Xbox has positioned itself as the gamer-friendly alternative to PlayStation. Sony, with its 'for the gamers' tagline, positioned itself counter to that.
Tomb raider angel of darkness for ps2 series#
After a few years of pushing Kinect, and a series of business decisions that didn't just leave gamers cold but outright hostile, Microsoft had put itself on the back foot with fans.
Tomb raider angel of darkness for ps2 Ps4#
Turn back the clock to 2013 (how is it eight years ago?) to the launch of PS4 and Xbox One, and you'll recall the moment Sony staged its comeback. Xbox has been borrowing a few PR tricks from the book of PlayStation these last few years.
