Sony intends to stave off the growing threat of cheap smartphone games by offering Vita titles at various different price-points.
There’s been a lot of noise lately about the traditional retail retail price-point for games being counterproductive, particularly in the handheld and mobile markets, which are dominated by cheap, simple titles made by small teams.
Last week, PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan said it would be “foolish and naïve to ignore what’s happening” in the smartphone sector. Talking to Gameindustry.biz today, he said: “I think it would be safe to assume we will take a more tailored approach [to pricing] than perhaps we’ve done in the past.”
That doesn’t mean Sony is just going to start churning out Angry Birds knock-offs, Ryan maintains that traditional handhelds like the Vita still have a lot to offer the core gamer.
“Absolutely it does do other things, but it has been designed as a gaming device, and a perfectly logical consequence of that is that the gaming experiences you can have on Vita are superior to what is possible on a device that has other functionality at its heart,” he said.
“It’s our challenge to ensure that the gaming experience that we provide is closer to that TV console experience than it is to your 69p thing that you’ve downloaded on your iPhone,” he continued. “If we do that and we provide great value to the consumer on games like Uncharted, I think the possibility to sustain historic console type price points is there.”
With any luck, cheaper Vita games should offset the cost of its absurdly pricy memory cards, great.
Source: Gameindustry.biz
