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Procrastinato on 29 December 2009
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Gnizmo said:
Procrastinato said:

Oh sorry Gnizmo.  You were under the impression that the PSP Go was a "new machine"?  You, um, think shrinking and rearranging some chips is pretty rough R&D work, eh?

I guess you speak for yourself, as usual.

I am certain redoing the layout of the machine, the sliding screen, and implementing the built in storage, and redesigning the battery cost nothing at all. I mean how could it? Its just a number of changes that affect the heat the machine generates, plus a new potential area for the machine to break at. Nothing you would want to send through quality assurance at all.

I like how you skip over the advertising budget though. The notion that shrinking chips is free, or redesigning the internals is cheap (electrical engineers make serious money) is strange though.

The PSP Go wasn't advertised very heavily, to my recollection.

Seriously, think in relative terms, Gnizmo.  Of course the PSP Go cost some money to R&D the new form factor, shrink the chips, etc. Of course it cost some moderate amount of money to make a new box, and advertise it (although it was quite light, in terms of advert dollars, I would think).

In the grander scheme, its risk factor was extremely low.  Its not a new machine at all, and is far cheaper to produce than the 3000, most likely -- or at least the analysts seem to think so, and that'd be in line with every other chipset shrink like... ever.  Given its hardware and especially software revenue potential, I think you'd be hard pressed to call it a "flop", even after the first 100K sales ($25M revenue) -- which I believe it surpassed in week 1. Add a couple retail-free, CoG-free software sales to each of those units, and I think you'd be pretty lucky to find any expert who'd claim the chip-shrinking and minimal adverts cost Sony more than they made back.

Financially, I doubt the Go cost Sony a dime at this stage.  I don't think they expected it to set new sales records, especially given its high price point, either.  I wouldn't call it a major flop, a flop, or even a minimal flop, just like I wouldn't call it a major success, a success, or a minimal success, because we're not really sure what Sony's plans were for the device.  Maybe its a form factor test for the PSP-2.  Maybe its a DD test, to give their DD infrastructure a workout.  Maybe they honestly thought people wanted a smaller PSP (probably true), and were willing to pay a premium for it (I doubt they thought that, I'm pretty sure the retailers must have demanded the high pricepoint, because it went from being a console which sells secondary goods, to being a plain ole one-sale electronic device).