We’ve talked about why buying the Vita isn’t a good idea right now, and how game developers are leery of developing for a portable console that will cost them a fortune. And now Sony has gone and done something really, really dumb: the Japanese will get their UMD games transferred into shiny digital versions, and the rest of the world can suck it.
Or, more specifically, according to Shuhei Yoshida:
“When you compare that to the price of games here, PSP games in Japan are sold at a much higher price, so people see the value in spending the $5 to $10 to get the digital copy. But when the games are already sold at a lower price in the U.S. we see less value in introducing that kind of system.”
Wait, wait, wait. You’ve got a portable with a hard road ahead of it, and you don’t see the value in telling all the PSP owners “Hey! Your games aren’t useless! Pay us another ten bucks and they’ll be on the Vita for you!” You see no value whatsoever in wringing another ten bucks out of games you’ve already sold to put them on a console people are leery of buying. At all.
Sooooo…you learned nothing from the PS3 launch, huh?
image courtesy Sony