Uh oh. Sony may think it can charge whatever it wants for hardware and the people will come flocking, but the high price of the PSPgo, not to mention its digital-only game library, has irked a number of independant retailers in the UK, who now see no valid reason for them to bother stocking Sony’s latest portable.
“From my point of view I’ve got to think, ‘Do I want to stock this?’ Right now I can’t see any justification for stocking it,”saysDon McCabe, Joint MD of UK retailer Chips.
“Certainly I’m not getting the response from consumers,” he continues. “Normally when a new piece of kit is launched or announced I’ll get a multitude of people saying ‘As soon as that comes out I want one of those.’ First adopters are on the phone within seconds of it being announced and you’ve got your pre-orders. I don’t have a single pre-order for PSPgo at the moment.”
Fellow retailer Grainger Games says that it has “no pre-orders at all” for the system, although it will have to stock a few just for anybody planning to drop in an buy one. Either way, it would seem that despite Sony’sarrogant claimsthat Europeans don’t care about price, the company’s hiking in PAL territories may just bite the publisher in its arse this time.
We’ll have to see how it goes, but frankly, if you’re going to try and price gouge in Europe as much as Sony is, you kind of deserve everything you get. Sony earned the lukewarm reaction to its hardware this time.
