back to article Sony to strike gold with PS Vita - if it cuts the price

Sony may shift more than $2.2bn worth of PlayStation Vita handheld consoles - some 12.4m units - by the end of 2012, it has been forecast. The catch: the price has to come down under $200. The prediction comes from market watcher Strategy Analytics, which reckons the gadget could revive Sony's fortunes. That $2.2bn figure …

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  1. MJI Silver badge

    We will buy when

    We can have multiple PSN accounts on one Vita. Or they hit £66.

  2. Tsung
    Devil

    It's not just the price of the console.

    You have to look at the price of the games and memory cards (some crazy sony format). This is going to kill the product quickly; memory cards are WAY over priced and the games? £30 a pop ?

    So after the initial fanboys, who else is going to buy a vita?. Parents with children? the DS seems a cheaper and more sensible option with plenty of cheaper back catalogue games. I suspect most other regular adults are happy buying games on their mobile / tablet at a few quid a pop (max).

    I cannot see a Market for the VITA there especially at current pricing..

  3. sabroni Silver badge

    Sony is a strong position, says Wu

    but tellingly omits Nintendo from the list of competitors. When the original PSP was announced "analysts" made it clear they thought it would win over Nintendo's toy DS. They were very wrong there, PSP did sell, but DS was the big success story.

    I'm not suggesting this will go the same way, 3DS hasn't been a soaraway success, but to list all those competitors and omit the one company that actively competes in the same sector makes this forecast look like wishful thinking...

    1. Kevin 6

      Re: Sony is a strong position, says Wu

      Well I'm guessing the original PSP sold as well as it did cause it was easily hackable to play emulators and bootlegged games. At least every single person I knew that owned one had theirs hacked and used it to play downloaded games, and never once bought a PSP game for it kinda like what happened on the Dreamcast (I know that's a console system, but I knew tons of ppl that owned one and paid for maybe one game bootlegged the rest). Whereas that wasn't the case with the DS the same people owned the DS, and actually bought the games ;)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Re: Sony is a strong position, says Wu

        Really? I don't know anyone paying for DS games, I've been told the cards you can apparently get from many sites online are so easy to setup someone without any IT knowledge can set them up and use them.

        The same can't be said for hacking the PSP which I am told is a bit more of a techie job rather than a mainstream user.

  4. Richard Wharram

    Memory cards put me off.

    Until or unless decent clone cards come out the price of cards is more off-putting than the one-off price of the console to me. I can wait.

    3DS will do reasonably well now since it plays DS games. Upgrading to 3DS from my very aging DS was a no-brainer for me at a shade over £100. I still mostly use it for DS games but that will change over time. There's a few decent games for download for them now at much more reasonable prices than the retail releases.

  5. Greg J Preece

    It's not the console - compared to a 3DS and even the original PSP at launch it's pretty reasonable. It's the games. It should not even be possible to pay £40 or more for a portable game, unless it's bundled with the PS3 copy as well.

    1. deshepherd
      Thumb Up

      "It should not even be possible to pay £40 or more for a portable game, unless it's bundled with the PS3 copy as well."

      Sounds like a great idea ... they could probably even charge a small premium for the "dual platform" version of the game in the same way that you can pay a little extra to get the dvd/bluray or triple-play versions of films etc.

      Of course, the fly in the ointment will be that games manufacturers will probably decide that if the PS3 and Vita versions are sold together then that's a single game so they'll introduce some internet based licensing check to prevent you playing on the PS3 while some else is using your Vita version!

  6. Southern
    Unhappy

    I had the misfortune to be in Game yesterday looking for something new for the Xbox at the weekend and happened to get beckoned over to the Vita stand there. What I found was that their cheapest deal was something around £300 for a vita, memory card and choice of one game out of two. Compare this to Amazon, who for £225 offer pretty much the same package.

    As with others, I'm voting with my wallet until the inevitable price decrease after shafting early adopters.

    1. measmyself

      Asda are doing it for £197.

    2. Blank Reg

      It's been reported that they are selling the Vita at a loss. If that is the case then they aren't shafting anyone, except perhaps themselves.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's not just the hardware price.

    Digital copies of games were supposed to be in-line with or cheaper than the retail dino's. At the moment a few are pretty close but then you have standouts from certain publishers that are as much as a tenner more to download than they are to pick up in the high street. For shame!

  8. mmm mmm

    Same here

    I'm waiting for the price of the console and the games to come down (I'll be wanting to buy the games on a memory card and boxed so I have a printed paper manual) but it won't be long before Vita-to-Micro SD converters are available on eBay.

    1. Mike Brown

      Re: Same here

      you might be waiting longer than you think. ive heard that the cards are encrypted so SD cards wont work, even with a convertor.

      I dont think £40 for 16gb is too bad. I remeber buying a 2gb card for the original psp for £100. and i thought it was a bargain!!

  9. jai

    i'm waiting for the price to drop, or for GTA V to have some kind of tie in with the console where the map is shown on the Vita if you use it as a PS3 controller, or something like that

  10. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Hmm

    <$200 will still equate to >£200.

    fuck sony.

  11. Chris Sanderson

    Just bought one

    Went into HMV and had a play, was quite impressed with Fifa so I bought one with fifa and a small memory card (not planning on downloading much)

    I'm actually a casual gamer, but I am out of the house almost all the time except when I'm sleeping due to commuting. I have a 3DS which I also really enjoy but for slightly more serious games I'd like to have the playstation.

    I did recently sell my playstation 3 for the reason that it was upstairs and didn't get turned on for about a year, hopefully the Vita will get a bit more use on the train, flights or when just generally chilling out and if fifa is anything to go by compares favourably with a PS3.

    I get the argument for Mobiles that can do a lot more but the graphics and controls are nothing like the vita. It might flop, there might not quite be the market but I find mobile games are great for 10 minutes then I lose interest.

  12. Greg J Preece

    Judging by this thread and others I've read, the common theme is "it's a really nice system, but we're waiting until it comes down a bit". Sony had better get on with those price cuts and take an initial-loss approach if they don't want this thing to suddenly flop like the 3DS did.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nice system, a pity it takes so long to load any levels. I was fortunate enough to try one out at a Gamestation shop and it seemed to take forever for the level in wipeout to actually be playable. The game is visually impressive, but if all games are so slow to load then I probably won't be getting one.

  14. MJI Silver badge

    Had a play

    Rather impressive.

    Tiny joysticks will take a while to get used to.

    Tried UC:GA, Wipeout and Motorstorm RC.

    Still worried about the PSN issue

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    blah!

    PSVita is expensive because its nearly as powerful as a full home console.

    I picked up a 3G model and its great, sure some games are hugely over priced, and like all formats the prices will drop. Ninty 3DS games are £35 in general if AAA games, Vita games can be more than that but generally they are pretty affordable you just need to shop around.

    PSN (SEN) needs to improve a lot though, I've got 360 too and I find the online experience far better than Sonys.

    Game load times have been improved marginally with a firmware update, but agreed Wipeout takes too long to load on a portable, although in reality it takes little longer than say a track to load in GT5, its just on GT5 you get loads of on screen bloat to distract the fact its loading.

    Its well documented why the Vita memory cards are so expensive, its because Sony had to stick loads of encryption in place, and the game carts... this is partly why its slow to load too..... all thanks to the boolegging freetards.

    1. Richard Wharram

      Re: blah!

      So when it's cracked and pirated games are available they will be much faster?

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