The 3 Word Pitch That Won Sony The Game-Consoles War Forever

I’ve been analyzing what makes certain pitches work better than others, i even review 1270+ of them, but i am always fascinated by short and to-the-point pitches, ones that all you need to say is a sentence.

In september 1998 sega released the Sega Dreamcast, a newer, CD-ROM based gaming console to compete with one last chance with the almighty winner of the game console wars — Sony and it’s PlayStation. But Sega was already doomed almost 4 years ago, and all but one 3-word pitch that arguably can be the pitch that started the path that Playstation started and has yet to end till this day.

A little background

The Sega Genesis, released on August 14, 1989, went on to become a top seller console with sky rockleying sales since the release day. In fact, remember Nintendo and its top selling NES? Sega matched Nintendo’s sales which were 23.3M units sold vs. Sega’s 22.4M units sold — a rounding error difference in 90’s terms.

1994 — PlayStation’s Hype

Sega’s (and Nintendo’s too) worst nightmare started to come tru in 1994, when Sony began it’s marketing hype towards the Autumn release in 1995 of the first ever PlayStation console. Sony didn't hide it either, it was their main message in the campaign — WE’RE COMING!

May 11, 1995 — The Day That Ruined Sega

So Sega got nervous. But they had a plan, they were about to launch the Sega Saturn in autumn, yet at the beginning on 1995 when Sony started getting some traction and demos released, Sega hastefully decided to release sooner by almost half a year to May 11th, 1995.

So they came to the conference, and gave a great pitch with the all technical glory of the day with graphics, and exclusive titles, and R&D and the full dog and pony show, and ended with the price of course, which was 399$. All this whilst releasing “Today!” instead of in ~5 months.

Then came Sony’s turn to pitch.

Steve Race from Sony came to the stage, organizes his papers for a second and then got close to the mic and just said “Two-ninety-nine.” and went off the stage. To the resounding cheers of the audience.

Aftermath

After the May 11th release, Sega had to deal with tons of complaints, delays and missing promised titles, all while Sony is sitting on the side with a front row ticket so someone else’s trying to do what their about to do, only with fu@#ing sony’s resources — needless to say, Sony weren’t worried either way, because they know they already won, now there just learning the city map before taking over it completely.

By the time the first Playstation was released in autumn of 1995 (as scheduled), it gave Sony plenty of time to react to Sega’s market response and improve product before release even more.

Why Then, That Specific Date?

Sega Saturn, between May-Sep of 1995 sold 80K units. Sony sold 130k in the first week of release.

It’s 1995, gaming console at this level is something that seems almost sci-fi to most people back then, there were “Camps” or sides like today between XBOX and PS, Apple and Android, Mac and PC, BMW and Audi (i imagine) and more, so consumers were not able to differentiate all the technical details and add-on services and features each console has, but instead focused on 2 things. one was known and inevitable — price, but the second one hasn't been seen since the first Macintosh days in 1983–84, the rebelness marketing campaigns to set apart certain consumers from the rest, that was what Sony did with the PlayStation 1 hype, and when you add that that it’s cheaper — Bingo.

That 3 word pitch “two-ninety-nine”, was an amazing instant reaction by Steve Race of Sony and one that was all about the most important thing a company should know — the audience of the target market.

Why Forever?

In the title i mentioned that Sony has won the game console forever with this pitch, and by forever i mean — the brand and impact it first made is one that still resounds today.

Sony has sold 102 million units of the PlayStation 1 while Sega sold 9.2 million overall — those 100 million units were sold due to critical understanding of the market and the forces that move it at the time, and it had a clear vision about what to do and that understanding possibly cemented the PlayStation brand in our life for the next decade and the one after that till this day and forward…

Enjoyed? don’t stop now…
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- SEED IS NOT DEAD! It just needs a new approach.

Cheers,
RT