Some 31% of people who have bought a PlayStation 4 had an Xbox 360 or Wii but not a PS3 in the last hardware generation, PlayStation's American VP of marketing John Koller told me in an interview here at L.A. this week. That's a decent amount of people making a switch to Team PlayStation and/or coming back to Sony after missing the PS3 era.


Koller was citing results of a research study that he said also indicated that as much as 17% of people who have bought a PS4 didn't own a console in the previous generation.

And who are the people buying the PS4 up until now? Primarily the hardest of the hardcore gaming populating, yes, though Sony has a different name for those gamers.


"The person that we've picked up since launch primarily is someone we call the connoisseur, someone that loves, unequivocally, loves games," Koller said. "They are the people who, when you walk in [to their home], there's no books on their book shelves. They're all game packages. They're the people who stood in line at midnight [for the console's launch]. They really are a fantastic consumer for us. They're a great part of the PlayStation nation."

The PS4 has been pretty hot and is already reaching beyond that crowd, he noted. "One thing that's interesting, though, is that we're starting to see a lot more of what we thought were going to be adopters later down the cycle coming in really early." Koller described that crowd as "indulgers, people that are traditionally a little bit more price-sensitive or down the funnel that have kind of bucked the trend as it were.'"

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