Thanks to recent price cuts, overall sales of the Wii and the PSP tripled last week in Japan.
Nintendo cut the price of the popular Wii console by 20 percent and Sony slashed the price of their handheld by 15 percent, both hoping to see a spike after months of slowing sales.
Both consoles were helped by releases of popular games, Gran Turismo for the PSP and Wii Fit Plus for the Wii.
... [ read the full article ]
Please read the original article before posting your comments.
PSP Slim Lite , 2000, 3000 or the new anti consumer, you no longer own any games & are blocked from selling them on, trading them, lending them to your mates, or even giving the games away for free, the new bend over for sony, PSP Go?
What i love about the PSP Go and Sony's ideas about digital distribution is that they could easily address the downfalls for it, but they don't.
1) Can't lend it to a friend.
Sony makes an digital ID system that allows you to download a whole game into someone else's PSP, in 48 hours it checks for the license, no license? Deactivate.
Or they could make it so you download the copy through their network for a nominal fee (thinking like $1-2) then in 1-2weeks the license reverts.
2) Can't sell the game
Ok huge profit opportunity they are missing for them, the customer, and developers.
Create a user store like ebay or craigslist to allow people to auction or sell used games. When legitment deals are made a $5 increase is set on the price and that is distributed to sony/the dev. You couldn't use a % here because people would make shady deals.
Better yet Sony just charges $5 for a service to permanently move a game from one console to another. Easy peasy. Go find your own buyer and have it moved.
Another idea - Allow sales of the license back to sony for credits towards other games. Sure Sony holds all the cards with this idea, but it beats not being able to sell games at all. This idea avoids sales of used games though. If Sony implemented an idea like the ones above where you can buy from friends and through ebay etc, they would want to also buy some back themselves to drive the used price up more through lower supply to increase new sales.
There are a million ways to do these things but Sony is seeing what they can get away with first.
Me thinks that the PS3 is going to have record sales numbers once GT5 comes out...even without the boost from Xmas (GT5 release date is 12-23 per newegg).
