HappySqurriel said:
I don't think it is lack of effort, I think it is lack of options ... If we were dealing with Sony in the mid 1990s (a highly profitable company) they could probably cut the price of the PS-Vita to $200 including the memory card, and spend a few hundred million dollars securing exclusive rights to well known IPs, but they don't have the money to do that today. I could be completely wrong but I suspect Sony is working extremely hard on a re-design of the PS-Vita to be released next year that changes the form factor and reduces the manufacturing cost so that Sony can afford to sell it for less. |
This is surely an option, then there is the choice of ARM CPU so that even if PSV initially sells horribly, its use in other devices will allow economies of scale, production process tuning and possibly even die shrinks that drive its price down anyway.
And there could be another option, smartphones with PSV compatibility, to widen the user base even if the pure gaming device doesn't sell very well. Obviously PSV smartphones would sell mainly cheap Android games and they'd have a far lower full-priced PSV games attach rate than pure PSV, but everything can help, and the larger sales numbers could make up for lower attach rate, at least partially. And let's not forget that smartphones can sell for far higher prices than portable consoles, so on them Sony could be able to profit on HW too since the start.
But about this option, Sony must be very careful to make PSV and Android markets coexist, not trying to merge them, because it could destroy the traditional portable gaming, and this would harm Sony far more than Nintendo, that can count on the best selling 1st party exclusives in the world.
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