Sony won’t drop the price of the PlayStation Vita handheld gaming system when it hits the Japanese market on December 17, prior to a world-wide rollout, as revealed by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan president Hiroshi Kawano in a press event prior to the Tokyo Games Show. The system won’t change its price of 24,980 yen ($325) for a WiFi-only model and 29,980 yen ($390) for a 3G-enabled unit, despite Nintendo dropping the price of the 3DS to $169.99 from $249.99 in the U.S.
Tooouuuuuch it.
While releasing new hardware in a global recession when your direct competition felt the need to slash their price by 32 percent may seem crazy, there is a method to PlayStation’s madness. Mostly, in that the Vita is something completely new. At the end of the day, the 3DS is basically a DS, just with 3D capability and a dearth of titles that could use that feature. The Vita is a handheld beast of a gaming machine aimed squarely at the hardcore gaming market, with 31 titles available in Japan at launch.
Part of the reason the 3DS is having sales problems is competition from the tablet and smartphone market. Whereas once parents would hand their kids a DS to get them to shut up, now it’s a lot easier and cheaper to load up Angry Birds on their mobile device. Eight year olds tend not to be graphics whores, so it cuts rather hard into a big portion of Nintendo’s market.
Vita, on the other hand, is reportedly a little less capability-wise than holding a PS3 in the palm of your hands. The handheld device is aimed at hardcore gamers, the kind who made Call of Duty:Black Ops the biggest launch of an entertainment property ever. The kind of gamer who describes themselves as “a gamer”, who looks at the “good enough” graphics and mediocre touch controls of a phone or tablet and wants to throw it across the room.
The question then being, do enough of these gamers exist in the portable realm? When I play a hardcore game, I generally need some time set aside to get into it. I drive, so I don’t need anything to keep me busy on my commute. If I’m at home, I have a 40″ TV with surround sound and a PC with a decent video card. Why would I bother with handheld?
Basically, Sony has to hope that there are enough hardcore gamers who, like me, want to play something more involved than Fruit Ninja, but unlike me, haven’t figured out that the only place they can really play games more involved than Fruit Ninja is at home.
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