We will buy when
We can have multiple PSN accounts on one Vita. Or they hit £66.
Sony may shift more than $2.2bn worth of PlayStation Vita handheld consoles - some 12.4m units - by the end of 2012, it has been forecast. The catch: the price has to come down under $200. The prediction comes from market watcher Strategy Analytics, which reckons the gadget could revive Sony's fortunes. That $2.2bn figure …
You have to look at the price of the games and memory cards (some crazy sony format). This is going to kill the product quickly; memory cards are WAY over priced and the games? £30 a pop ?
So after the initial fanboys, who else is going to buy a vita?. Parents with children? the DS seems a cheaper and more sensible option with plenty of cheaper back catalogue games. I suspect most other regular adults are happy buying games on their mobile / tablet at a few quid a pop (max).
I cannot see a Market for the VITA there especially at current pricing..
but tellingly omits Nintendo from the list of competitors. When the original PSP was announced "analysts" made it clear they thought it would win over Nintendo's toy DS. They were very wrong there, PSP did sell, but DS was the big success story.
I'm not suggesting this will go the same way, 3DS hasn't been a soaraway success, but to list all those competitors and omit the one company that actively competes in the same sector makes this forecast look like wishful thinking...
Well I'm guessing the original PSP sold as well as it did cause it was easily hackable to play emulators and bootlegged games. At least every single person I knew that owned one had theirs hacked and used it to play downloaded games, and never once bought a PSP game for it kinda like what happened on the Dreamcast (I know that's a console system, but I knew tons of ppl that owned one and paid for maybe one game bootlegged the rest). Whereas that wasn't the case with the DS the same people owned the DS, and actually bought the games ;)
Really? I don't know anyone paying for DS games, I've been told the cards you can apparently get from many sites online are so easy to setup someone without any IT knowledge can set them up and use them.
The same can't be said for hacking the PSP which I am told is a bit more of a techie job rather than a mainstream user.
Until or unless decent clone cards come out the price of cards is more off-putting than the one-off price of the console to me. I can wait.
3DS will do reasonably well now since it plays DS games. Upgrading to 3DS from my very aging DS was a no-brainer for me at a shade over £100. I still mostly use it for DS games but that will change over time. There's a few decent games for download for them now at much more reasonable prices than the retail releases.
"It should not even be possible to pay £40 or more for a portable game, unless it's bundled with the PS3 copy as well."
Sounds like a great idea ... they could probably even charge a small premium for the "dual platform" version of the game in the same way that you can pay a little extra to get the dvd/bluray or triple-play versions of films etc.
Of course, the fly in the ointment will be that games manufacturers will probably decide that if the PS3 and Vita versions are sold together then that's a single game so they'll introduce some internet based licensing check to prevent you playing on the PS3 while some else is using your Vita version!
I had the misfortune to be in Game yesterday looking for something new for the Xbox at the weekend and happened to get beckoned over to the Vita stand there. What I found was that their cheapest deal was something around £300 for a vita, memory card and choice of one game out of two. Compare this to Amazon, who for £225 offer pretty much the same package.
As with others, I'm voting with my wallet until the inevitable price decrease after shafting early adopters.
Digital copies of games were supposed to be in-line with or cheaper than the retail dino's. At the moment a few are pretty close but then you have standouts from certain publishers that are as much as a tenner more to download than they are to pick up in the high street. For shame!
Went into HMV and had a play, was quite impressed with Fifa so I bought one with fifa and a small memory card (not planning on downloading much)
I'm actually a casual gamer, but I am out of the house almost all the time except when I'm sleeping due to commuting. I have a 3DS which I also really enjoy but for slightly more serious games I'd like to have the playstation.
I did recently sell my playstation 3 for the reason that it was upstairs and didn't get turned on for about a year, hopefully the Vita will get a bit more use on the train, flights or when just generally chilling out and if fifa is anything to go by compares favourably with a PS3.
I get the argument for Mobiles that can do a lot more but the graphics and controls are nothing like the vita. It might flop, there might not quite be the market but I find mobile games are great for 10 minutes then I lose interest.
Nice system, a pity it takes so long to load any levels. I was fortunate enough to try one out at a Gamestation shop and it seemed to take forever for the level in wipeout to actually be playable. The game is visually impressive, but if all games are so slow to load then I probably won't be getting one.
PSVita is expensive because its nearly as powerful as a full home console.
I picked up a 3G model and its great, sure some games are hugely over priced, and like all formats the prices will drop. Ninty 3DS games are £35 in general if AAA games, Vita games can be more than that but generally they are pretty affordable you just need to shop around.
PSN (SEN) needs to improve a lot though, I've got 360 too and I find the online experience far better than Sonys.
Game load times have been improved marginally with a firmware update, but agreed Wipeout takes too long to load on a portable, although in reality it takes little longer than say a track to load in GT5, its just on GT5 you get loads of on screen bloat to distract the fact its loading.
Its well documented why the Vita memory cards are so expensive, its because Sony had to stick loads of encryption in place, and the game carts... this is partly why its slow to load too..... all thanks to the boolegging freetards.