Pachter: PSP Go! Is a Ripoff
- Scribbled on June 9th, 2009 by Jordan Lund
- Filed in Industry News, Interviews, Sony PSP
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Notoriously inaccurate video game industry analyst Michael Pachter from Wedbush Morgan Securities came out today and announced that Sony is ripping people off with the $250 price point on the PSP Go!
He claims that it costs Sony less to make the Go! than the 3000 series model of PSP, and you can see that. The Go! has a screen that’s a half inch smaller, which I’d presume is less expensive. They ditch the UMD drive in favor of 16 GB of flash memory; I’m not sure what cost savings that would represent, but it may indeed be cheaper. Yet, despite being cheaper, it’s actually priced $80 more than the standard unit and $50 more than the software bundled units.
Pachter actually has a point. The PSP Go! is a new form factor for old hardware, like the Playstation One and Playstation Two. Aren’t these new, smaller machines supposed to be cheaper than what we saw before? You can argue that miniaturization makes it more expensive, but a lot of the shrinkage is caused by losing the UMD drive.
If Sony really wants to increase sales, and at this point they pretty much have to, they should aggressively price the PSP-3000 at $99 and use the existing price points of $170 and $199 for the PSP Go! ($170 for the bare unit only and $199 for one with a software bundle.)
June 10th, 2009 at 1:55 am
Sony seems to have trouble pricing their units to compete with alternatives on the market… While the idea of downloading all my software is exciting to me (and the wave of the future) the average user is going to be turned off by it, and won’t see the advantage in it, only the hassle… At the same time Sony is pissing off brick retailers asking them to carry a unit they’ll never see any additional sales on…
You have to wonder who is running things over there?
June 10th, 2009 at 2:23 am
I was talking about this with a couple of Game Crazy employees over the week-end. They were excited about the PSP Go! until I pointed out that 1/4 of the chains profits come from used game sales.
DOH!
I can see it causing confusion at Christmastime too… Gramma buys the kids a PSP Go! and a couple of games. Games that won’t work with the Go! DOH!^2
June 10th, 2009 at 7:33 am
Well, another source of income for the retailers, once the gamers are downloading everything, are the accessories with their proprietary connector. Which is one of the main reasons I’ll pick up a PSP-3000 once my PSP-1000 quits on me.
September 17th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
[...] boycott a “big ticket item” like the PSP Go, even though he himself declared the PSP Go was a ripoff, before hastily backpedalling from his [...]
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:52 am
[...] famed game industry analyst Michael Pachter called the machine “a rip-off (before hastily retracting those statements), then a few relatively minor European retailers [...]
February 28th, 2010 at 12:02 am
[...] time Pachter backtracked on his opinions; the most notable instance was when he recanted saying the “PSP Go! is a ripoff”. Oh, that nutty Pach [...]