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

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.

[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.

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?

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.

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.

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?