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

Already?

[mrxak]

We're talking about the holiday season already? Isn't it August?

Re:Already?

[Kryis]

What? You mean you haven't got your presents sorted already?! Theres only 130 shopping days 'til Christmas!

Re:Already?

[__aaclcg7560]

For video games companies, the crunch time is now to get titles ready and out the door before the holiday shopping season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. PC titles can wait until the very last minute to go on the shelves. Console titles have to get approval before going to manufacturing and that's usually six to eight weeks before they appear in the stores. The PR machine has to go into overdrive to get gamers and ordinary consumers interested in the new titles. You know for sure that the ERSB will be checking each title twice by inspecting every coffee cup. Like a lot of retail businesses, the video game companies makes or loses money on the holiday season.

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...

[Volante3192]

This is, of course, assuming there would be sales of the PSP between now and 3 months from now.

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.

Re:No shit, Sherlock.

[rishistar]

In fact, on current form, Sony should be announcing a price hike.

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.

whew, that was close

[Tsiangkun]

I thought I missed the opportunity to get a $250 PSP, thanks SONY for keeping them around a little longer.

I for one, do not, want a cheap-ass $150 PSP to compliment my $700 PS3.
I hope they raise the price just to show the world how much better the PSP is than the DS.

Other holiday non-plans for Sony

[wilson_c]

In related news: Sony denies plans to release compelling content for PSP.

A Sony spokesman today denied that Sony was doing anything that would encourage potential customers to purchase its PSP portable gaming system, currently languishing on store shelves everywhere. "Sony really likes what Nintendo has done with the DS. Apple's video iPod is pretty impressive too. We can't do anything to touch that and we think that even trying would just muddy the waters and possibly confuse customers into purchasing our system". To avoid millions of disappointed customers, Sony has developed a three point program:

1. Keep prices uncompetitively high.
2. Avoid revisions with features competitive to the DS.
3. Keep working hard to thwart hackers trying to run homebrew mods: as the only group interested in the PSP, Sony needs to remain vigilant in case this community comes up with the great games that they haven't.

Other related stories: UMD - Today's Betamax or Today's MiniDisc?