Sony must swallow pride of be damned
Inside Network analyst and awesome-name-haver Billy Pidgeon has declared that Sony must follow Nintendo’s lead and cut the PS Vita’s price if it wants the ailing handheld to succeed. In addition, he has called for more and better games — certainly a boon to any gaming device!
“Although the hardware is high quality, Sony may need to follow Nintendo’s lead and cut price drastically next year if the installed base remains below five million or the platform will not be viable for publishers,” he told NowGamer. “Also the proprietary memory cards for PS Vita are prohibitively expensive.
“There should be more downloadable software, including inexpensive or free games, and these must be higher quality than popular iOS and Android games. It would in fact be helpful if the best and most popular smartphone and tablet games were also available for download to PS Vita.”
He was quick to point out that the Vita’s not been all bad, taking note of hot titles like Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation and Persona 4 Golden. However, despite an improvement to sales, he believes the system could be much stronger than it currently is, and I don’t think anybody could argue that.
Trouble with Sony is, it’s an arrogant company. As we saw years ago with the PS3’s original price, the PlayStation owner believes it has the same zealous and loyal fans as Apple, and can get away with charging customers anything. Sure, Sony has some customers who will literally spend whatever they’re told to spend, but nowhere near the number required to get away with charging obscene prices for proprietary nonsense.
Nintendo fell on its sword and reduced the 3DS’ price when the 3DS was in a better position than the Vita currently is. It might not be “fair” that Apple can get away with gouging its customers and Sony can’t, but them’s the breaks.
Offering free games along with a memory card that’s too small to fit the games on is not going to tantalize the public.
