Sony Denies Holiday PSP Price Drop

1up reports that Sony has no intention of dropping the PSP's price this holiday season. The idea of a price drop, put forth by CNN's Game Over column, has been flatly denied by the company. 1up writer Susan Arendt thinks they may be just a little bit false here: "I'm going to be the 'glass half-full' person and suggest that by saying the company 'currently' has no plans to cut the price 'at this time,' the Sony rep wasn't just being repetitive and redundant, but rather suffering from a Hamlet-esque condition of protesting too much, indicating that Sony does, in fact have a big fat price drop planned, especially considering their history of holiday price cuts."

Comments

Of course...

[CaseM]

they have "no intention" of dropping the price this holiday. If they announced that, whatever sales they might have had betweeen now and then would be practically nil as people just waited. This is the same thing Nintendo did with the DS Lite. They claimed over and over the no DS Lite re-design was in the works. Why? To keep sales of the old DS's up, of course.

Re:Of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, save your breath about units shipped vs units sold. The "shipped" number is only inaccurate as far as units in customer hands is concerned.

And you can have more shipped units than actual physical units!

Let's say Sony makes 1 million PSPs and ships them out to retailers. Shipped = 1,000,000 units.
Let's say BIG_RETAILER sends back 100,000 PSPs because they were, well, gathering dust. Shipped = 1,000,000 units (Sony did ship 1,000,000 units, after all, just that BIG_RETAILER shipped Sony 100,000 PSPs).
Now lets say Sony sells to DISCOUNT_RETAILER those 100,000 PSPs. Look! Shipped = 1,100,000 units.

So Sony shipped 1,100,000 units, but sold 1,000,000 units. Of course, retail sales numbers can only go as high as the number of physical units, but it's possible to ship 1,100,000 units and still only have a handful of people buy one.

The PSP did real well in Japan. When North America got the same opening shipment, well, there were localized shortages, but I could go and buy a PSP quite easily. In fact, a few months later I bought another PSP when they were heavily discounting the initial shipment ones. (All for homebrew, of course).

Then again, I suppose one way to boost sales numbers is to get people like me purchasing multiple PSPs so we have our 1.5 homebrew-running and play games from memory stick rather than UMD, and another one with the latest firmware to play games until the crack comes out.

No shit, Sherlock.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth would Sony announce in August that they will be cutting the price of the PSP in 4 months? The sales would tank until the cut, as people would just wait a couple of months to save some money. So of course Sony will deny any future price cuts.

Of course they will deny it

[RootsLINUX]

It's obvious why they are going to deny this. If they announce it, that means their already lack-luster PSP sales will go down, since consumers are now aware of the eminent price drop that has been confirmed. They would be insane for announcing a planned price drop that won't occur for months, even if they really are planning it.

Then again, this is Sony we're talking about, so sanity doesn't really play much of a factor in my argument. :(

Too much?

[Aladrin]

They protest too much? They said 'No' 1 time. That doesn't sound like much to me. Instead it sounds like a wanna-be reporter desperately trying to put spin on lack of news.