The Associated Press is running a real hootenanny about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calling the PlayStation console and its games ‘poison’ to children. Chavez made the shocking statements during his weekly TV/Radio show “Alo Presidente,” and called on local manufacturers to make educational toys, and also dolls with faces and features like native Venezuelan people as “capitalistic” alternatives, such as a Barbie doll “have nothing to do with our culture.” However, the heat was really turned up when he directly stated that,
“Those games they call ‘PlayStation’ are poison. Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, ‘you’ve got to find Chavez to kill him.'”
I could only imagine the reaction of PR for Sony Venezuela. However, things took a really strange turn when Chavez turned that into a dynamic of international arms sales. Apparently, if a game has the ability to “bomb cities or just throw bombs,” then they are sold by capitalist countries to sow violence so they can “later sell weapons.”
Furthermore, apparently PlayStation games “promote the need for cigarettes, drugs and alcohol so they can sell them. That’s capitalism, the road to hell,” he added.
The AP also wrote that Venezuelan lawmakers in October passed a law outlawing the sale of “bellicose” games and videogames that can be punished with up to five years imprisonment. However, we’re not really sure if Sony is selling the PS3 there or not anymore. We checked out Sony Venezuela’s website and the link to the PS3 page is broken on the main site, but searching yields plenty of results.
From a business standpoint, it does hurt Sony when the leader of a country specifically calls out your brand and deems it in such a negative manner. It will be interesting to see if this has a financial impact on Sony’s PlayStation brand in this area over the next quarter or two.
