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PSP Pricing, Competitiveness Analyzed

Posted by simoniker on from the priced-out-of-the-market? dept.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Yahoo/Reuters Japan report discussing the upcoming conflict between Nintendo's GameBoy Advance and Sony's PSP handheld consoles. Some of the most interesting speculation comes on pricing, where the article says: "Sony has not set a price for the PSP, a multi-media unit that also plays movies and music, but analysts expect it to sell for 19,000-30,000 yen ($161-$255), well above the 12,500 yen price tag for GameBoy Advance SP." Overall, the piece portrays Nintendo as "no pushover" when it comes to ceding GBA dominance, suggesting the PSP is not a direct competitor, and moreover, that Japanese analysts "..argue that Sony's incentive to go after market share is not as high this time because mobile games provide smaller margins, and less profit, than console games."

3 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. SONY Clie as portable gaming machine by cloudless.net · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have always wondered why doesn't SONY put a direction pad and game buttons on Clie PDAs. The Clies have 320x320, 16-bit color screens, plus a 200Mhz CPU. Should be more than capable for running great games.

  2. no original psx games? by u-238 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "Because Sony's PSP will not play existing PlayStation games..."

    I know that you wont be able to just pop in a PSX game and play that, they're doing it in a mini-disc format called a UMD, which is like a DVD mini disc cartridge.

    But I thought they were going to convert some of their flagshipt psx games to mini disc (umd) format, so you could play the originals on the PSP.

    Was I mistaken, or is this articles context misleading?

  3. Profit margins of games? by sagrotan · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Most GBA games are around 40 Euro, GC/Xbox/PS2 games around 55 Euro. True, in addition GBA games come on a cartridge which has a higher production cost than a DVD.

    On the other hand, with the amount of SNES games re-released for the GBA and possibly less content creation (no huge 3D worlds, music scores etc.) for handheld games, the margin should be fairly healthy.
    And as it is with Nintendo ruling the handheld market, it must be like printing money for them right now.

    So the incentive for Sony to get a share of this market should be sufficiently high. Are they trying to dampen analysts' expectations because they expect Nintendo to be a harder fight this time than they were with the PS1 vs. N64?