PSP Pricing Announced

Grey Ninja writes "GC Advanced has reported from the Tokyo Game Show that the PSP will retail for $349.99. Coupled with the previously announced price of the Nintendo DS at $149.99, it's going to be interesting to see if Sony will be able to convince developers and consumers alike that the price point is a good one. It's looking more and more all the time like Nintendo's going to take this one." Update: 09/28 17:24 GMT by Z: The story seems to have devolved into rumour under examination. Take this one with a grain of salt.

Comments

In other news...

[Ayaress]

Anybody who didn't see this comming a mile away is blind, dumb, or both.

Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

Between the Gameboy Advance SP at only $79 and the DS at $149, Sony's PSP is going to collect a lot of dust on the shelves. Especially due to the reduced incomes/increased debt of the American population...

Re:Yep.

[Ayaress]

I wouldn't say that's a forgone conclusion. The Playstation consoles have major brand-name recognition and a considerable following, consisting heavily of the 18-25 gamers who criticize Nintendo for having mostly kids' games. Rather than being the next N-Gage, I think we have the next Game Gear here: It'll do moderately good, but it's too far undersold by a competitor that was already wildly successful when they came along.

Re:Yep.

[Troed]

Make that gamers of ages 13 to 18. Anyone older than that appreciates what Nintendo does - GOOD games that doesn't need excessive violence, blood and nudity. Or something.

I'm 30. I have lots more Gamecube games than I have games for my Xbox and PS2 together.

Re:Yep.

[NanoGator]

"I wouldn't say that's a forgone conclusion. The Playstation consoles have major brand-name recognition and a considerable following, consisting heavily of the 18-25 gamers who criticize Nintendo for having mostly kids' games. Rather than being the next N-Gage, I think we have the next Game Gear here: It'll do moderately good, but it's too far undersold by a competitor that was already wildly successful when they came along."good games. Would a game company put all that effort into a game they will make significantly less on? Ports are one thing, and this system would lend itself to those... but I dunno.

I'm going to be honest, I'm a Nintendo zealot. And yes, I heard that from Nintendo. But it's an interesting point. I hope for Sony's sake that those discs are considerably cheaper than the DS's cartridges.

Re:Whoa

[DigitalDemon617]

I wouldn't even pay $350 for a home console, let alone a portable. Although considering what the battery life on a device like the PSP is going to be like, it practically is a home console.

doomed

[cgenman]

Sony needs to get that price down, and fast. While it is an impressive piece of hardware, they would be charging more than twice the current generation hardware costs for a portable, and probably more than the next generation hardware is going to run. That's insane for a handheld. "Cheap" has always been required for the success of a handheld, as they are generally stand-in between times with a full-fledged gaming system. No matter how ludicrously powerful the thing is (it's nuts), it is still going to be second string to a full-fledged system.

Selling at 350 is suicide. If their launch strategy is to start at 350, then when manufacturing ramps up the following month drop that to 250, they might be passably OK, but they'll never get the penetration of the Game Boy.

Why is it things like this are so hard to see for execs and the dev team?

Re:They're not targetted at the same audience

[real_smiff]

ah that's why the N-gage was such a sucess. oh no, it wasn't. i'd (if i want to be really geeky ;) rather have an iPod in my left pocket and a DS in my right. or maybe a DS in my right pocket and my MP3 CD player in the left.. or.. well you get the idea - not one fat $350 battery eating games machine.

Price Not Offical

[EastCoaster]

If you read the article now, it says that the price of $350 is not offical from Sony. I feel that Sony could release it for 250-300 but any more and you can forget it. If Sony is to beleive the PSP is the "iPod" of portable gaming and can charge a premium they can forget it. Sony has yet to lose money on a piece of hardware and this might reflect in the overall price and $350 would make sense to Sony. Only time will really tell.

Re:They're not targetted at the same audience

[Servo5678]

The PSP, on the other hand, is more. It's supposed to play DVDs, music cds, mp3s, etc, etc. It's more of a multi-purpose thing that also plays games, and is priced as such.

So we're looking at a machine that does a lot of things but does none of them very well?

The fact that the DS is "just a game system" is a major selling point for me. I don't want a portable system that plays DVDs, MP3s, makes breakfast, etc.

Nail in the coffin

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony needs to go back to school and brush up on their Video Game History. In the late 80's and early 90's, which handheld game system was the most technically advanced? NOT the GameBoy. The Atari Lynx and Turbo Grafix portables were in full color, while the GameBoy had a green "pea soup" LCD screen capable of 4 greys. Wow. Which system survived? Game Boy.

Next came Sega Game Gear. It had a nice color screen so good that you could even buy a TV adapter and watch TV on it. But man it sucked down batteries like I suck down ho-hos. At the time, GameBoy STILL was only in lousy greyscale. Which system survived? GAME BOY.

Then came the Neo Geo pocket, Bandai's handheld, Tomy's GameCon, etc, etc, etc...

Every time, Game Boy has been the DOG of the bunch in terms of technology, but always the best priced system. So guess who will win this round? The $149 system or the $359 system??

WTH is going on

[netfool]

The source they're linking to is gcanvanced.com, which quotes their source as pspadvanced.com.

When you go to pspadvanced.com site it says "pspadvanced.com coming September 31st", so it's not even a live site yet (that, and the fact that there is no such date as September 31st, there's a 30th and a October 1st...). And when you click that link it brings you back to the gcadvanced.com forums which are currently closed because they're bieng moved...

Judging by the name of the domains, there's probably a good chance they're both the same company, but why the hell would they quote a site of there's that's not even open yet as their source?

Oh, and this price was apparently "un-officailly" set by Sony...

This is a real cherry of an article.

Nintendo breaths a sigh of relief

[clu76]

Wow! That just eliminated the possibility of me picking one up for myself. Besides the price, I think Sony is failing on several levels.

While I think Sony was smart to purse the 18-25 demographic, I think they've missed an opportunity to capture the large demographic of women gamers. Over at the official japanese DS site, Nintendo is featuring a young woman laughing and writing on the DS. I believe they're implying she is chatting with someone using pictochat. The DS comes with pictochat built in. Pictochat + touchscreen + wireless is a huge boon for Nintendo to capture the women demographic, as the DS is now by default, a communications device.

As for kids... Many parents won't fork over $350 for a handheld. But let's say you have two kids, it makes more sense to get each kid their own DS rather than pay an extra $50 to get a single PSP.

It also won't help Sony that Nintendo will start selling the DS earlier, releasing the product in time for the busiest American shopping day of the year, the day after Thanksgiving. The PSP, reportedly, won't ship until after xmas.

As for the PSP having video play back functionality, I don't think it'll make one difference. One would have to buy or re-buy movies. Buying movies will also cut into consumers funds to buy video games. Plus, you can't casually watch a movie like you can casually listen to music.

Re:They're not targetted at the same audience

[buffer-overflowed]

The law of convergance is that any such product will:
1. Do anything it claims to at about a quarter to a half as well as a similarly priced stand alone product.
2. Achieve about 90% of the functionality in most areas but cost more than if you purchased each stand alone product individually.

Also, with your typically converged product, when one component fails, you're fucked. Like a combination DVD/Reciever. Reciever component fails and the whole thing is useless(no sound).

Oh, and as to Music CDs/DVDs. It's too small. Where would you put them? We all know it's UMD anyway.

We'll presume the $350 figure is correct.

$350 buys you:
1 Nintendo DS @ $150 + tax - Integrated microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, no need for a memory card/stick, etc. Functionally about midway between an N64 and a Gamecube. Touchscreen, which means at least one or two totally unique and mindblowing games will come out for it if it succeeds.
1 MP3 CD player @ $80

$120 of cold hard cash to pad it all with or buy games/accessories.

Unless you plan on rebuying all your movies, that's enough for a hefty current-gen flash cart(which can play full length movies for a GBA, albeit at an inferior quality due to the size constraints, I'm sure the carts for the DS will do better[if they exist]. It also lets you play every last game in the GBA/GB/GBC/NES/SMS and a variety of other system's libraries), or 4 GBA movie carts.

Hmmm... which is the better deal?

No way San Jose!

[mrshowtime]

Look, the PSP will cost Sony about $100 bucks to manufacture, or most likely less, since a lot of the tech is borrowed from PS3 developments. The most expensive "development" on the entire PSP would be the UMD drive. I doubt Sony will offer the PSP for $149, as the Japanese pride issue comes into play; they know that the PSP is better, why should they have to price it as the same as the DS? $250 would be the max price for this system at launch and that would be reasonable. If Sony was smart, they would launch at $199. If Sony would launch the PSP with a $300 price range, they will doom the system to just "status symbol" status, that it will never recover. The PSP is a conundrum; it is essentially a portable PS2 without the PS2's games. Also, if Sony launches at a rediculous price point, then developers will drop like flies.