{"id":4365,"date":"2011-09-14T14:45:12","date_gmt":"2011-09-14T19:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=4365"},"modified":"2011-09-14T14:25:02","modified_gmt":"2011-09-14T19:25:02","slug":"no-price-drop-when-playstation-vita-hits-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/entertainment\/no-price-drop-when-playstation-vita-hits-japan\/","title":{"rendered":"No Price Drop When PlayStation Vita Hits Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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Tooouuuuuch it.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> the biggest launch of an entertainment property ever<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Basically, Sony has to hope that there are enough hardcore gamers who, like me, want to play something more involved than Fruit Ninja<\/em>, but unlike me, haven’t figured out that the only place they can really play games more involved than Fruit Ninja<\/em> is at home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[769,258,740,1302,1304,316,5228,1305,1301,58,1303,994],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4365"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4365"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4381,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4365\/revisions\/4381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}