Sony’s advertising is usually great. Their #4ThePlayers campaign has been good and well rounded so far, never really taking any cheap digs and playing on nostalgia for PlayStation, which is perhaps their strongest point.
And now they’ve sullied it with this – an image tweeted from the PlayStation EU twitter account with some text which reads like something an ill-informed fanboy might write on a forum. It’s not only a cheap dig, but a poorly put together image featuring the phrase “in 1080p graphics”.
They don’t make a distinction between the PS4 running Ghosts natively at 1080p and the Xbox One version upscaling from 720p, either. It’s just a mess, and quite unprofessional, even if they’re essentially trying to mimic their used game announcement from E3.
Still, they make a good point in that you can upgrade for only €10, and the image is actually from Ghosts, so that’s all fine, they’ve got some useful stuff in there. Oh, and then there’s the #4ThePlayers tag in the top right. Great.
It’s also worth noting that the resolution of the image is only 440×440, and therefore looks rubbish within the context of this article. Perhaps Microsoft will send us one with a better resolution to turn the tables.
Starman
MS should do an ad showing a pile of music cd’s “the only place to play all your music cd’s”
double-o-dave
To be honest I haven’t even got a pile of CDs anymore. They got transformed into MP3s etc years ago.
You may as well do an ad showing a pile of Vinyl records next to an Amiga.
JR.
I don’t see a problem with this at all. You can’t play COD Ghosts on the X1 in 1080P. It’s a fact. If you’re upset about this, it’s only because it matters.
The Von Braun
Nice to see Sony (finally) promoting a feature it’s hardware can do, games related, for once.
As an age-old gamer, this is kinda tame, comparison wise.Give me the glory days of:
Sega running Sonic on a Genesis console, next to a SNES with Mario 4, with banner reading: ‘Compare for yourself’, or Commodore’s magazine adverts portrayl of Atari’s ST as being clockwork and having a kids toy mouse or the Vectrex being advertised as THE system chosen 2 to 1 over Atari and Intellivision for real arcade play or Intellivision adverts comparing the ‘high resolution’ visuals of it’s games, compared to same version running on the Atari 2600.
Plus, if your talking poor use of screen shots, guess you were’nt a 8 bit tape gamer then?.So many tape games had screenshots from better looking versions on them, so as an Atari 800XL owner, i’d buy say a Mastertronic game which had C64 screens on the inlay or as a C64 owner, i’d see St screens etc.
Hell System 3 even went as far as to claim Flimbo’s Quest had been awarded a Zzap 64 ‘Sizzler’ award, when it no such thing.
So i’m used to advetising tricks pulled over the years.At least Sony’s here are honest.
double-o-dave
I remember buying Speccy games, and at the time the pics on the back looked amazing… then you discovered they were from the latest Amstrad etc.
DarkLord
Makes a change for Microsoft to be at the receiving end. Since pretty much the birth of social media, Microsoft have been kings at manipulating public opinion, they convinced a generation of gamers that it was cool to support the underdog with severs reliability problems and costly online play.
Very recently, Microsoft got caught playing games at Reddit.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-positive-reddit-comments-2013-6
And everyone knows the stories about the fake queues at the Xbox360 London, Birmingham and Manchester stores, with the midnight launch queues consisting almost entirely of Microsoft staff bussed in for the event and given a pile of cash to spend, look photogenic and then a console to hand back in afterwards..
Starman
“servers reliability problems” are you serious HG? Remind me which game network is down yet again for maintenance today? And which network suffered the biggest ever breach of user data? I’ve used both ps3 and 360 lots over the years and live is clearly superior.
Wardy-77-
I used Live for about a year and really don’t see the magical difference Call of duty and other games all ran just like they do on PSN I was expecting never to be disconnected again buttery goodness,yes there may be regular maintenance on PSN but I don’t really see that as a bad thing, its a few hours every so often you may not be able to game online no biggy and a lot of the time it doesn’t even affect peoples ability to play on line,I would rather they kept on top of stuff and did maintenance than not bother for sure.
Awayze
Serves MS right. Got sick of the “on Xbox” adverts for COD. The average consumer who knows f all about gaming would assume it’s only on xbox.
The Von Braun
I’ve still got the issue of C+VG where Sega were claiming the Saturn would have a 64 bit GPU and seem to recal a Jap.TV advert for the Saturn where same claim is made….and that was little more than some false accounting (2X 32 Bit RISC chips do not a 64 Bit machine make).Atari did similar with the Jaguar (64 bit system? well…..Data Bus gubbins etc yes..but you had 2X 32 Bit chips:Tom and Jerry, 16 bit CPU etc etc), the 850 pixels a sec animation speed was a total lie as well.
Nintendo:N64 was great machine, but…not quite Silicon Graphics workstation visuals, a la early Project Reality claims…infinite sound channels? err, not quite as each sound channel used a % of CPU power…
Maybe Sony should just edit the tagline, just add to existing (‘you can play in 1080P graphics’ line), but we’re not going to say too much about the frame rate, as it’s currently a bit of a mare!, we really hope this get’s patched, but hey, what do you expect? it’s not like they built game engine from ground up for our new platform, but then, shit’s n giggles, we could’nt even tell them how much Ram it was going to have to the very last minute…’
Not quite as catchy though, is it?
:-)