With a little over a year into its life cycle, Sony has cut the price of the new Playstation Portable system, the PSPgo, to $199, down $50 from the original launch MSRP. The system, which boasted a sleeker design, longer battery lifetime, built in 16GB of memory with expandable M2 stick, as well as the ability to download games all via the web like the iPod Touch, has yet to really gain the attraction that Sony was looking for, while its bigger brother, the PSP-3000, fairs much better.
Many blamed the initial high price range that Sony was looking for, although to be fair, at the time, the 16GB iPod Touch was $299 and now, the Touch is $229. In both cases, Sony was offering a gaming device with the same memory and expandability for a lower price. Other point to the fact that a game that you can buy on UMD (Universal Media Disk, the system the PSP-3000) were the same price as their downloadable counterparts. Again, this puts Sony in a tough spot. They don’t want to piss off their retail partners like Gamestop who makes money on selling UMD games where they see nothing from downloaded games for the PSPgo. But a clear example of this again can be Apple where retailers love carrying the iPod Touch, even though they see no income from the music, videos, apps and games sold on it, simply due to the high volume sold and the income from that, as well as the ecosystem of docs and cases that surround most Apple products.
Will this drop in price be enough? I hope so, but again, Sony still lacks the marketing so a price drop without a media campaign might not go too far. Sony also needs to realize that at the end of the day, Gamestop and other retailers are only dedicated to themselves. If pissing off Gamestop and offering cheaper downloadable games (since the user dosent pay for the packaging and there is no cost of shelf space and transportation), means selling a lot more of the PSPgo, then Sony needs to do this now. Downloadable content is the future, as Apple has shown. One day, your Playstation 5 will have no disc drive, nor will your computer, and so Sony needs to jump on that bandwagon now instead of protecting partners who only care for themselves. All this now begs the question, will $199 get you to join the PSPgo community?
Is Sony starting to slowly transition away from the self-made format, the memory stick? Most new Alpha, the NEX and some Cybershots can now handle Memory Stick Pro Duo and SD cards, and the new PSPgo takes the new M2 sticks (although I believe thats more due to size). Now, Sony is releasing a SD card and reader for the Japanese market. The MRW-F3 titled, USB 2.0 SD card reader is priced at $18 and will hit the streets on November 10th.
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