Legal Niches

Pachter: $249 PSP Go Rips Off Consumers... We Must Agree

By gamepolitics

For an industry that's supposed to be all about fun, the video game biz is tightly managed from a P.R. standpoint. Not too many people speak their mind publicly or wander too far off message.

That's why we enjoy Mike Pachter, who tracks the industry for Wedbush-Morgan. The guy may not always be right, but he always says what he thinks.

And when Pachter says the $249 PSP Go announced at E3 is "ripping off the consumer," we must agree. The analyst, who was otherwise complimentary toward Sony's E3 presentation, slammed PSP Go pricing to host Geoff Keighley on an E3 edition of Bonus Round:

$249 is too much. Period... The [current] $169 PSP-3000 is a profitable device - the disc assembly, for a UMD, costs more than 16 gigs of flash does. So this new device doesn't cost them as much to make as the PSP-3000 and they jack the price up $80...

 

I'm sorry to say it. I don't want to get bad fan mail from the Sony fanboys, but... They're ripping off the consumer until they sell a couple million and if consumers don't buy it then the price is going to come down... they're making a lot more money on the PSP Go than the PSP-3000. And the PSP Go helps them because there's no piracy...

Maybe I like Pachter because his take on the PSP Go echoes my own. Here's what I tweeted about the system during Sony's E3 press conference last week:

Kaz [Hirai] is holding up PSP Go, but sez PSP 3000 won't go away...

Kaz PSP Go $249... Too much. Sense Me feature will match ur PSP music to ur mood. Um, thank you, no...

 

[Jack] Tretton: Resident Evil Portable. Let's hope that's a working title. LBP for PSP looks sweet. Crowd not really into PSP news, tho.

Via: Joystiq

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on June 10, 2009 (boomark / email).