Saturday, October 03, 2009

Am I missing something here?

Sony's PSPGo
Ok, at the time of writing I can buy a white PSP 3000 base unit from Play.com for £129.99, and a 16Gb Memory Stick Pro Duo for £54.99.

Add them together, and you get the functionality of a PSPGo, but for £184.98. And how much does the PSPGo cost? £199.99

Er...

Actually, I wasn't being quite honest. You don't get the functionality of a PSPGo, but in a cheaper package. You get slightly more, as you can still play USB games.

I have a soft spot for the PSP, probably more than it deserves, but this just seems like crazy pricing to me. As a consumer I'm constantly walking the line between "more money than sense" and "just the right amount of money for my limited amount of sense", and am prone to splash out on upgraded toys on a whim (hey, I bought a DSi because my DS was broken cosmetically). But the DSi also offered more than the DS. Not much more, but still, it felt like an upgrade.

I don't even particularly object to having to rebuy my old games to download, as the pricing on the Playstation Store doesn't seem too far out of line (though as I write this I realise I may have crossed that money/sense divide again).

For the convenience of carrying around a good sized library of games, that load faster than before, and without the horrible UMD drive noises, that doesn't seem like too much of a burden. Especially when they are great games, like Rockstar's PSP back catalogue, for example. Ahem.

But overall I find it hard to get excited about the PSPGo, as I've not seen or heard any evidence of a real reason to consider it an upgrade.

Which is a shame to me. And I guess, possibly Sony.