I'm ready to do away with portable media, gaming load times, screen imperfections, and my ipod touch.

@Rain

I have already, and I don't know how it justifies an at least 80 dollar+ extra fee, I don't usually post about something I'm not interested in, but I just don't get Sony these days. They can easily charge people 150 for it with the tech they have in there yes, but when is that? Do they think I'll thank them when they do drop the price? hell no. It's all a mental game with these assholes.

@dahuman
you don't understand why it would be more expensive?
Take your pic,

New hardware (no savings based on economies of scale like the pSp3000 enjoys)
R&D costs
server space for digital copies of every psp game
licensing fees for new tech
consumer demand

take one or all, they all contribute to a higher cost psp.

hello moto!

the only extra licensing fee right now is bluetooth, they took out th UMD completely btw. you think these server spaces and bandwidth would cost more than the UMD media itself per download? o_O; come on now. Battery life is the about the same, how's that consumer demand? I also don't remember consumers demanding digital distribution, Sony is the type of company that tries to tell consumers what they want, not what most consumers really want. =_=;;;; following is a personal opinion but I really doubt they spent that much on R&D by looking at that thing, it's kinda iffy at best. I'm just trying to stay on topic, and I'm on the side of the PSP GO will fail atm because Sony just looks half assed with it.

UMD is a cost they have always dealt with.

Servers and bandwidth are a completely separate, completely new cost. Whereas UMD took a dollar or so out of the profit on every game sold, servers and bandwidth and associated fees are an added cost separate of sales. Meaning, say nobody buys pspgo. They still had to pay for the servers and the bandwidth, which are a much higher price upfront. The silver lining is that, over time the cost spreads out and will not need to be recouped any longer. That equals price drop.

I don't know how much bluetooth is, but I'd guess about 1-2 dollars per console.

Since you seem to know almost nothing about consumer demand, I'll tell you how that works.
You take a product, product A. You ask several thousand people how much they would pay for product A. You track how many would buy at each price in increments of, say, 10$. You then end up with a distribution graph. (similar to a bell curve that you may be familiar with). You then use a formula which factors in costs per item and demand (how many people at each price bracket) and you find roughly how many and what your net profit would be at each price level.

Naturally you will price the item at one that makes the most profit. At higher price, less people will buy, which may sound like it will recoup because it's fewer people spending the higher price, but keep in mind the bell curve I mentioned earlier. Pricing something too high reduces overall income.
When people like you think Sony is retarded for charging so much for their products, you completely fail to take into account the scientifically proven methods of establishing price based on what a consumer themself values the product to be.

Not only that, but consoles are generally a razor blade model where each console sells ~8-10 games over it's lifetime. The money made on the games greatly outweighs the profit coming in from the console itself. Therefore there is also a tendency on the consumer demand formula (for videogame consoles) to underprice.

I don't think you are going to take anything away from this because it seems you have a pretty good anti-pspgo attitude already formed, based on what I read in your post:

You dislike digital distribution
you dislike the battery life
you dislike sony (and actively misrepresent their strategy apparently)
you dislike the pspgo design, and think it is iffy
you think the pspgo is halfassed in general.

To really change your mind, I would have to address these other complaints of yours, of which, only the point on digital distribution is debateable. The battery life is ok to complain about I guess, if it weren't for the fact that all PSPs have had the same battery life.

DD is going to be a hard sell because you either believe in it or you don't. All I can say is that every tech company is poised toward DD and has been successful on things such as PSN, Steam, MS games for Windows, and several other venues.

The other 3 things are your opinion, so I'm not going to bother.
You are entitled to think that it is a bad decision to price the pspgo at 250$, but if you are going to be actively vocal about hating on something, I'm going to tell you you're wrong.

It can do everything an IPod touch can do, except touch screen. It has a cheaper price, for now, and has a huge library of high quality games that are simply beyond the scope of what the Touch has shown thus far. All that ram and clock speed means nothing if you don't have the games to back it up.

All psp really needs to do is introduce extremely casual apps, like the lightsaber app on ipod.

Not only that, but the pspgo is upgradeable with cards. (AFAIK the ipod isn't)

oh you are certainly right, if nobody buys the PSP GO, then the cost of the servers would be just sitting there, that's some awesome strat right there man. the later strat you mentioned after that is also the very same one they are doing with the PS3, how quickly that got old eh? these shitty decisions they make is really amusing to me. what's even better though, I don't dislike Sony, I just think some of the people working within that company are dumb asses. I'm a steam user, I only buy games on steam unless it's not on steam, apparently I'm a believer in DD, but the price is simply ridiculous if you know how much these things are at a vendor lvl(in which I do.) even if you are not, the average, the real average consumers(apparently soccer moms, 5 year olds, or grandpas of this generation as some people claim, I'll never understand it,) they see 250 dollars for a portable, the end result would be "wtf?" Sony is nuts.

anyways, bluetooth+DD+cheap flash vs UMD and UMD disks pretty much balance each other out, not to mention different licensing fee style with DD vs Hard Media, 250 dollars, give me a god damn break haha, it's a joke.

edit: btw, iffy is the R&D cost, not the design, I really doubt they spent that much R&D coming up with that, it's not new tech at all.

The thing I wonder about with the PSP go is whether it can be successful being that its design goes against elements that worked so well for other handheld gaming devices ...

Whether someone upgrades their handheld or an additional handheld is bought for a household, the fact that games were on physical media enabled people to share their games within their household (for the most part) which made it a fairly easy sell. When you move to a DRM based digital download service with no sharing there is very little value to upgrading your system or buying an additional system for the household because money already spent on games can not be used on the new system.

I too think 250$ is a lot, but when I think about some other things, it doesn't seem like so much.

The costs associated with UMD were based on economies of scale, that is, the cost of the manufacturing plant, the materials, the negotiations with companies and such get distributed over the course of the life of the product. Say you make one UMD, that UMD equals the cost of everything required to mass produce them. We'll say 50M$. which means the profit is one game sale - 50M$= -49,999,959. If they sell 200M UMDs, the price per unit becomes 50cents. At a certain point, UMDs affect on costs is virtually nothing. At this moment in time, compared to UMDs, server costs are literally a thousand times more expensive than UMDs.

The strat involving buying the servers, is as necessary as buying the manufacturing plant, or fishing boat, or farmland for any other industry. It's a gamble, but a necessary one, especially if one wants to eventually drop prices to it's lowest possible level, something that is impossible if such facilities are simply rented out.

It's possible that Sony does have some people making bad decisions, but it's also possible that we just don't understand their business practice. People complained about the gow2 goat fiasco, and the baby commercial, and subtle product placement in virtually every movie that comes out, but it doesn't take away the fact that ps3 is selling on par with a rival that has half the upfront price and arguably a better library.

Trust me, you are a believer in DD, eventually. You are currently tied down to the tangibility of current medium. Some people like me, are not so tied down. However, I'm not saying I could do without cd cases and DVD collections, because I love those things too. But I know that there will eventually be something that replaces it, like DLC, or special artwork representations, holograms, or whatever the market decides is valuable. But at the moment, the convenience associated with DD is beyond compare. The MP3 player turned my 15 pound CD book into a ~1 pound drive. The pspgo will turn a carrying bag into a carrying "sheath". That's just my opinion though.

The casual price point will be a concern, but it will be fairly obvious that the pspgo is not the best psp, only a DIFFERENT kind of psp. PSP 3000 will still be around and will probably be 150$ with a bundled game by the time this comes out. (It's 179 now with ratchet and clank) On top of that, there will definitely be a trade in price at gamestops for people who really want to upgrade. People won't say "wtf?" They'll say "hmmm, is there a cheaper one?" and get subsequently shown the psp3k

I don't really know how much R&D costs myself. But R&D techs and think-tanks are pretty well paid, and you have to figure in hardware design, which goes through many revisions, hardware specs, and other such things. Though it may only take a month to think up all these things, professional artists and designers make 80-120$ an hour yaknow? It's all very expensive.

PS: I for one, am buying one, and I've never liked PSP. I own a ds.