$350. For whatever it’s worth…
http://www.gcadvanced.com/article.php?artid=3307
It ain’t worth $350 to me.
Patience is a virtue…
Sony must be letting their success get to their heads. That price is outrageous.
Who do they think they are? Microsoft?
And that’s the game, folks.
Always good to believe pricing information from a site dedicated to a console made by a company who is your direct (and only) rival in the market segment!
…or alternatively, Sony’s floating trial balloons and seeing if they pop.
To be fair, it’s not just the GBA site that’s reporting this, and the story certainly didn’t originate with them.
Most of what I saw linked back to that site as their source, though. If there are independent sources it’s a lot more worrisome. I can’t even conceive of a handheld system that cost more than the roughly equivalent home system did when it was brand new working out. If this is true, someone should dig up the old TurboExpress propaganda and make it their job to send one pamphlet per day to Sony until they get the point.
Actually that was roughly the price of the PS2 (a bit more expensive actually) if you convert it from the yen when it first released over here and many have said that they think it will go for a higher price in Japan than it will in the US. I believe this information is related to the ripplings from last week of about 33,000 yen which was strongly suggested to be the price and either someone doesn’t know how to do their currency conversion, or the same ripple is appearing in different places.
So its entirely possible that if its true its only the price over here.
-Kitsune
I smell a hoax
Be that as it may, that would still strongly infer a $299.99 launch tag over here (in line with the PS2 launch price) which is grossly over-expensive for a portable. Either that, or Sony would have to price the thing here at something around 55-65% of the cost of the product in japan concurrently, which isn’t something I can recall seeing any game maker ever do.
I take it 33,000 yen doesn’t strike you as completely ludicrous to the same degree it seems to strike those of us over on this side?
Mind you, I’m not all that enthused about the DS nor have I ever been into any of the Nintendo portables. However, I can’t fathom what would make a PSP worthwhile at that pricepoint unless there’s a concurrent announcement for a very inexpensive disc writer for the computer so that it’s feasible to compare the whole unit to a DS + a 2 GB MP3 player. And I somehow doubt the emergence of a UMD writer/UMD writable media at launch, much less an inexpensive one.
If this ends up being the price…
Looking at that little remote media controller posted in the other thread, I have to wonder if they are thinking ipod with that price point. In other words, someone thought “Heck, if people pay $400 for an mp3 player, why wouldn’t they pay $350 for a cutting edge game system AND mp3 player all rolled into one?”.
Of course if that is their plan, it makes a bulky and awkward mp3 player, and Sony is bound to hamstring those capabilities with DRM and their silly memory sticks.
That’s pretty much what I was thinking too. The design certainly seems to be strong enough, much like the iPod’s, to break into the mainstream. However, the two main problems are
a) It plays videos in a proprietary format, so you need to build a seperate library, unlike the iPod
b) Videos don’t lend themselves to the kind of portability that audio does. If you’re watching a movie - you’re only watching a movie. I can listen to music and work at the same time.
It’s a nice looking machine, but that price puts it at almost $500 CDN which is more than I paid for my PS2/GT3 bundle a year after the PS2 launch
That reminds me, does anyone have access to the sales figures for those “video cartridges” for the GBA that contain an episode or so of cartoons like Spongebob?
In the last month or so I’ve notice that they’re taking up more space at the local Walmart’s GBA section, and have added more titles to the list. I was wondering if this means the format is doing well enough to expand.
GBA Video sales
NICKTOONS COLL VOL 1 $2,276,521 114,298
SPONGEBOB VOL 1 $2,258,897 114,721
SPONGEBOB VOL 2 $2,032,150 102,173
FAIRLYODD VOL 1 $1,655,702 83,191
FAIRLYODD VOL 2 $1,534,390 77,059
JOHTO PHOTO FINISH $1,525,276 79,482
SONIC X VOL 1 $1,028,913 51,556
FOR HO-OH BELLS TOLL! $989,941 51,761
CARTOON NTWK COL VOL1 $894,234 44,807
DORA EXPLORER VOL 1 $732,800 37,688
ALL GROWN UP VOL 1 $705,261 37,299
YU-GI-OH! VOL 1 $683,648 34,276
CODENAME:KIDS VOL 1 $518,691 25,985
JIMMY NEUTRON VOL 1 $515,085 25,855
STRAW SHORTCAKE VOL 1 $432,887 23,187
NINJA TURTLES VOL 1 $207,708 10,429
August sales: 151,808 / $3,009,587
Total sales: 913,767 / $17,992,104
Taken from the Internet video game capital of both sales and retards.
In other sales-related news, Nintendo is coming up on their 20th GBA million seller pretty soon. (Nintendo-made, doesn’t include third party million sellers.)
And to answer your question mouselock, no, it doesn’t bother me. I won’t be picking up a PSP at launch for other reasons (down the road the lower price will just be icing on the cake when I eventually do pick it up) but it wouldn’t bother me if it were 40,000 yen. There’s obviously a limit, but I don’t know what it is. The price has nothing to do with it, the DS which I’m far more likely to pick up sooner wouldn’t bother me to pay around that much for, it’d just take me longer to save up for it. shrugs
I’m paying more for the brand than anything else and I don’t really have a problem with that. I suspect most Japanese don’t either, since we’re all going to pay 9200 yen for Dragon Quest VIII and used to pay up to 15800 for it. Though I’m sure the PSP is a very expensive piece of hardware to produce, it doesn’t have anything to do with it being worth that amount and everything to do with it being a Sony PlayStation portable. The more what I’ve built up in my mind as signifying that brand bubbles up, the less I’ll be able to resist. Also, the fact that it is portable makes it more valuable to me, not less. If it were the other way around and portable were more expensive than consoles, I wouldn’t balk, though I’m more than happy enough that it isn’t that way! ^_^
Hey, I’m just being honest!
-Kitsune
And therein lies a crucial difference: the Japanese are used to having to pay outrageous sums of money for this technocrap! :D 9200 yen? That’s about twice what new videogames cost over here, depending on exchange rates, etc. And you guys used to pay twice that? :shock: Not since the bad old days of 16-bit cartridges have I seen games routinely priced over $60 in the U.S.
For those of us on this side of the Pacific, I think the popularity of such technogadgets is much more price-sensitive. Sure, every once in a while a high-end gadget like the iPod comes along and develops a certain cachet; but to be honest, MP3 players wouldn’t’ve caught on without much cheaper alternatives. iPod was - and remains - a high-end product with a fairly narrow clientele. A portable gaming and media-playing device like PSP, though, which is intended to move hardware and software, can’t possibly sustain itself with a small customer base.
Furthermore, the PSP may suffer from a jack-of-all-trades phenomenon: namely it tries to do too many things and fails to do any of them very well - especially for that price. Add to that Sony’s proprietary UMD format and I can’t help thinking that - unless the price seriously comes down or Sony has a brilliantly effective marketing campaign - the PSP will go the way of Mini Disc in the U.S…
And therein lies a crucial difference: the Japanese are used to having to pay outrageous sums of money for this technocrap! :D [/quote]
That’s why I was asking. I think it’s possible given that answer that the PSP could debut stateside for a signifcant amount less. (Say $100 or more.) I can’t see paying another DS above and beyond what a DS costs. But if it were to show up at $250 and I wanted a portable, the extra $100 premium over a DS for the MP3 + movie features plus the extra horsepower of the unit might be tempting enough for a lot of folks. (Especially the college age crowd that PS2 seems to really be aimed squarely at, who have enough money that $250 is doable but no real obligations elsewise. And who aren’t old enough to worry about what they’ve done to their credit history yet. ;) )
Given that games over there are selling for substantially more if popular enough, it seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to conceive of Sony placing a premium on the Japanese PSP that those of us stateside would never see.
As I see it, I’d rather buy two DS and a couple of good multiplayer games at that price.
Or a DS and a nice amount of good games for it.
-Shiroko
Everybody has to make predictions!
Japan: $350
US: $300