MikeRox said:
1. Your arguments are flawed. Especially the XSEED one. Yeah 10 people might be localising it, but they are releasing a niche game, so already not expecting anywhere near the number of sales. Lower retail may shift more copies, but Vita has a very low userbase installed. They also don't pocket all the money themselves. Sony take about 25% of that retail price in licensing fees. The original developer of the game also get a cut.
2. It's not black and white that it's cheaper to develop for ergo games must be cheaper. Graphics also aren't the major cost (game engines are generally off the shelf and half the work is already done). Just because a game doesn't look awesome, doesn't mean a shit ton of man hours didn't go into the actual game play, balancing, net code/infrastructure etc. Some of the most complex games out there are presented as barely anything more than a spreadsheet. (Football/Soccer Manager, I suppose because this game is purely photographs, text boxes and charts, it should have been 10 cents?)
3. As for the iPhone/Android argument. Barring flash style games, I've not really found anything worth playing on them and this is with a Samsung Galaxy Nexus. But they are also ad subsidised and/or going out to potential userbases in the hundreds of millions, very low budget and very low risk. There is also very little put into the design of these games, the graphics might look as impressive, thats because of the game engine they're created in, not that they spent loads making the visuals look good. There are exceptions, but these actually cost more and require a lot of marketing/presense to make an back their development budgets.
4. You'll notice the high flyers in the mobile gaming space tend to make clones, sub par spinoffs of big console franchises or very low budget pick up and play games. I can't think of any with the size/depth of stuff like New Little Kings Story, also, it's not just the Wii version, it's a rebuilt game.
5. Fact of the matter at the moment is Vita games are generally requiring large budgets (certainly at least on par with PS2 titles which also cost $60 on release). Again I'm not saying all games should be $40+ on Vita (Dungeon Hunter, Resistance etc just don't offer enough end product to justify a full retail price), but particularly the examples you refer to of Little Big Planet and New Little King's Story I'm happily paying full money for, and if you can find me anything on Android/iOS that can come close to the experience they provide, please enlighten me.
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1. you're missing the point, niche as the game may be, the development cost that XSEED will incure is still significantly low. Sure they will be paying royalties and stuff but the bulk of the development cost has been covered already during the Japan release. Everything else is pure profit. Lower game prices can help increase sales of Vita thus also boosting hardware so this argumet doesnt realy hold water.
2. Again your missing the point. Developing or making the modles/sprites are done by the graphic artis etc. In doing their job, they incure man hours which translates to cost. More man hours would also mean that the systems, building utilities such as water and electdricity are also being used. But with less work needed for the graphics, less man hours are needed, thus also lessening the useage of utilites. This will again translate to lower development costs. I also mentioned that the vita is easier to develop for as stated by some developers. Again this would mean less manhours needed for coding and optimization. and agian less usage of utilities and such.
3. The number of crazy biased fanboys here in VGC (not gonna say who they are, I'm sure you've read some of their crazyness 
) would beg to differ. There was this article on yahoo the other day listing the top 10 games to get for your iphone5. And I must say that about half of those looks really nice. And I think one or two were even free and was supported by adds or something. And the price was really low, I think it was less tha $10 or something. Anyways, I cant say base on experience, but base on the nutiness around the net and around here claiming that smartphones and tablets will be taking the market away from handhelds tells me that the game quaility (graphics and stuff) are catching up or are even on par already.
4. It doesn't really matter if a game is arip off or a clone or whatever, so I fail to see your point. As for new king's story, it may be a remake but the game mechanics are already there. Thats a nice chunk of the development cost already coverd.
5. Its all an assumption which you have no concrete evidence of. I've pointed out numerous reasons why development cost is lower for portable games. If you want more proof, why is it that most of the time, develoment teams working on portable games are significantly smaller as compared to console games? Development time is also the same. Conclusions can be derived from this that it takes less effort to make portable games which again translates to significantly lower development cost, but isn't reflected on its retail price.
With regards to the marketing thing you mentioned, what marketing? Sony's marketing sucks balls. It sucks so much balls that when people see me with my Vita they think I'm playing a psp 1000...true story. I was playing my Vita on the train a few weeks back and some teenage kids were looking at me. They were lowering my voice but I think that their eardrums have been fried due to the loadness of their music but I still heard them talking about how chuncky my "PSP" was and that the latest model was the "PSPGO" which was small and hand internal memory. How lame is that?
Anyways, if your're happy paying full price for little big planet then I'm happy for you and more power to you. I on the otherhand will wait for November and hope that there's some price off holiday sale on PSN.
