by Playfuls Staff |
4th April 2007
Sony recently announced that the price for its portable gaming console will be reduced, but only in the US.[more]
Sony Computer Entertainment of America announced yesterday that PlayStation Portable will see a cost reduction in the US, from the original $199.99 for the Core Pack (comprising of the PSP, battery pack, and adapter) to the newly established price of $169.99.
The price cut is in celebration of the system's two year anniversary, sources at SCEA said. To further add to their biennial festivities, Sony is placing Daxter and Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror to the PSP Greatest Hits collection of discounted titles.
Although the price cut is significant, PSP’s odds against its cheaper rival Nintendo DS are not very optimistic. At least in Europe, where Sony declined to offer any details about a possible similar price cut.
According to Kotaku, Sony
responded to a Gameindustry.biz inquiry by saying that “We have no announcements to make about the PSP in the European market at this time.”
Despite the fact that the PSP registered the most successful console launch ever in Britain (including portable and fixed consoles), it still lags far behind Nintendo’s Dual Screen, which managed to find more than 10 million owners by the end of 2006 in the entire European territory. The sales also include the redesigned DS Lite that came out in June 2006, and just in December 2006 alone, Nintendo managed to sell some 1.7 million DS units across Europe.
In Japan, things don’t look well either. Home of one the most powerful gaming communities in the world, the Asian country loves Nintendo more than it loves Sony in the portable consoles’ domain: DS beats PSP by a factor of 1 to 5 there.
A comparison between the two is however an injustice done to Sony. From the beginning Sony intended to make the PSP a portable media center, with the gadget being capable of running games, playing music and even movies on the TFT LCD screen that measures 110 mm (4.3 in) diagonal with a 16:9 ratio and a 480×272 pixel resolution capable of 16.77 million colors. Specifications state that the PlayStation Portable is capable of rendering 33 million flat-shaded polygons per second, with a 664 million pixel per second fill rate. The DS is only made for games (although it still has an interesting wireless-chat feature).
While Sony managed to sell around 20-21 million PSPs worldwide since the console’s launch, overall sales for the DS reach more than 35 million units. By December 1, 2006, more than 6.63 million DS were sold in the US.
