The first official commercial for the PS3’s Playstation Move controller is now online, and it takes some pretty blatant and harsh jabs at the competing motion-sensitive technologies used by Nintendo and Microsoft.
The ad features Playstation’s new ad guy (“Kevin Butler”) who claims to be from the future (November 2010) where the Playstation Move has, of course, become a huge success. He walks by two people who are demonstrating the motion controller.
The first is playing a gritty boxing game. Kevin comments, “Real boxers don’t hit like this” and then mimics exaggerated stale movements that is an obvious slam on the Wii’s limited depth-sensitive motion controls.
The second player is using Playstation Move to play a shooter game. We then hear a sarcastic and harsh critique of Microsoft’s upcoming Project Natal, which uses hand and body movement exclusively without any controllers. Though Natal is not named, Kevin is obviously referring to it when he says, the Move has “what we in the future call ‘buttons,’ which turn out to be pretty important to those handful of millions of people who enjoy playing shooters or platformers or anything that doesn’t involve catching a big red ball.”
He finished by adding, “Who wants to pretend their hand is a gun? What is this, third grade?”
Despite the cutthroat nature of the video game industry, guerilla marketing is not usually in the tool belt of most gaming companies. However, this move on the offense from Sony shows that it is trying harder than ever to get its message to consumers that the PS3 is capable of running superior technology.
Watch the full ad below:
