Tag Archives: John Koller

Speaking to Gizmodo, SCEA marketing boss John Koller’s opined that DSi isn’t enough to move Nintendo’s handheld business out of its traditional 12 year-old male demographic

“I can see the DSi being successful,” said the exec. “The DS lite was obviously very successful. Will DSi do well with [the DS's] demographic? It probably will. Will it be a product that expands their user base [beyond] under 12? I’m not sure.”

Koller added that the machine was likely to do well, nonetheless.

“Nintendo has kind of a history of these kinds of updates, and even with DS Lite, there was a lot of discussion, ‘Is that enough?’ And they seemed to do pretty well there,” he said.

Pretty well, yeah. More through the link.

Speaking to Edge, SCEA’s John Koller has acknowledged that PSP software releases have slowed down, but said things are going to turn around next year.

“I think going into next year we’re going to see significant growth,” he said. “We’re counseling retail to be ready for it.

We have a number of very strong franchise games on the docket that will be launching next year. We haven’t gone public with those, and many third-parties have not yet either because they’re concentrating on holiday, but we have a number of very strong titles coming.”

The PSP market’s shifting, apparently, towards “young moms,” so expect 15,000 PSP Spyro games in 2009.

“When we launched the PSP it launched at a 28-year old, heavily male, New York subway [demographic], and that slowly trended down. Now we’re in the mid-teens with a lot of tracking even younger than that,” Koller added.

“Our research shows that in the next 12 months young moms actually are set to have the highest propensity to purchase the hardware and software for their young children.”

Loads more through there.

God. Sort it out, Sony. John Koller, SCEA’s director of hardware marketing, has posted on the US PS Blog to say that PSP 3000 doesn’t have a reduced battery life after all. Absolutely not. In no way is PSP 3000′s battery life reduced.

“I’d like to make a correction and clarify that the new PSP will have equivalent battery life to the current PSP, about 4 to 6 hours for games and about 4 to 5 hours for UMD videos,” he said.

“While the enhanced screen of the new PSP draws a little more power, our engineers in Japan worked to reduce the power consumption of the overall system including its components, so you won’t have to worry about losing any time when enjoying the more vibrant visuals displayed with the new PSP.”

Koller previously told Gamespot that last week that, “Battery life will decrease by a small amount, it’s about 20 minutes maybe 30 minutes and that’s because there’s a larger power draw with the brighter screen.”

Maybe he was talking about a different PSP 3000, or something. Read Koller’s full post through the link.

Speaking at E3, PSP brand manager John Koller told Pocket Gamer that the firm’s considering a dedicated Store for PSP.

“Having a native store on the portable is something we’re looking into,” he said.

And that was that.

Speaking at the sixth annual Wedbush Morgan Securities Management Access Conference in New York yesterday, SCEA senior marketing manager John Koller called PSP a “gateway drug” into the console world.

“In the past, it was a small screen experience. It was something that was very difficult to have from a social perspective,” he said. “Those things have changed.”

Koller added: “It’s become, from a gaming perspective, a lot different than I think we even envisioned it when we first launched it.

“That’s a very good thing. It’s expansionary. For us, the PSP is a very high growth, high margin business and something that is a very good product for us.”

More on GI.

In an interview celebrating PSP’s third birthday, John Koller, senior marketing manager for the machine, said he sees it being around for a ten-year cycle.

“We’ve talked about the PSP being a ten-year product, but a ten-year product in the continued… lifecycle,” he said. “So we obviously had the 1,000, we have the 2,000, so the PSP as it was first launched in March 2005 isn’t going to the be the one that it ends up as in ten years, but it will still be a very strong portable gaming device that is centered in gaming and has a lot of multi-functional features.”

Koller added: “We look at it just like our console business being a ten-year cycle, but we do see iterations as we go along to really adjust to the market… The 2000 series adjusted to the market in terms of making it more portable. What we’re seeing now, at least in the near- to mid-term, is going to be firmware updates that add features and other functions that the consumer’s asked for.”

With recent events suggesting PSP could get some serious competition from iPhone, it will be interesting to see what Sony can do to its handheld to keep it fresh in the coming years.

By Mike Bowden