PS2 Net Adapter Sales Are Strong
Playing games online has become surprisingly popular among owners of Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 2, boding well for the industry’s ambitions to turn video game consoles into gateways for selling music, movies and other digital wares.
To connect PS2s to the Internet, gamers must buy $40 adapters, which started selling in August and unexpectedly have become a scarce commodity.
A sampling of 25 Southern California stores earlier this week found 24 were sold out of the device. Clerks, who said they’ve had to turn customers away, report that the adapters sell out as quickly as they arrive.
Though people have been able to play online games on their computers for years, they’ve only recently been able to take their consoles online. Online games, including consoles, could be a $2-billion-a-year industry by 2005, according to IDC. For players, these connections could bring new games, new levels of play and even new opponents. For media companies like Sony, consoles represent a conduit for delivering entertainment directly to customers’ living rooms.
Industry executives thought only hard-core gamers would embrace online console games at this early stage. Sony shipped just 100,000 adapters to U.S. stores this summer. For this holiday season, it’s only producing 400,000 for the U.S. market, a fraction of the 11 million PS2s in use nationwide.
Sony executives said they’re surprised how quickly the adapter is selling and plan to boost production. The device, the size of a large deck of cards, screws onto the back of the PS2 and has a dial-up modem and an Ethernet port for high-speed Internet connections.
“I must say we are a little bit overwhelmed by consumer interest,” said Andrew House, executive vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, the U.S. arm of Sony’s PlayStation division. “We are doing everything possible to increase production capacity.”
Game publishers also were taken by surprise. Electronic Arts Inc. said 195,000 people have signed up to play its “Madden Football 2003” online via their PS2s since the title launched in August. That translates to more than one in 10 players who bought the game’s PS2 version.
“These are pretty active accounts,” said Frank Gibeau, vice president of marketing for Redwood City, Calif.-based EA. “We have a guy who’s played 500 games already, and it takes about half an hour to play a single game.”
Players of Sega Corp.’s “NFL2K3” football and “NBA2K3” basketball games for PS2 also have shown high interest in finding online opponents. One in five purchasers of those titles currently play online, said Tom Nichols, vice president of sports marketing for Sega.
The initial feedback augurs well for the launch next month of Microsoft Corp.’s online game network, Xbox Live.
Still, analysts caution against irrational exuberance. Early buyers tend to be technophiles rather than mainstream consumers, and once they have bought their fill of adapters, sales could drop off.
“While there’s some enthusiasm for playing online, it remains to be seen when that will catch on as a mass market opportunity,” said P.J. McNealy, an analyst with research firm Gartner Inc.
