I said it when you made a huge case about the Minis pricing initially. Devs set the prices. Market determines if the prices are batshit crazy. In other words, Tetris launched on iPhone for $7.99. Market said "GTFO with that shit" and the price came down accordingly. When I can choose between Prinny for $10 and Tetris for... $10.... guess which one I'm going to pick?

Now the REAL question I havce is how will developers read the lack of sales at the high price point? Will they consider it a matter of insane pricing turning off consumers or a sign that PSP is not a viable platform? I hate to be predictable but I have a feeling EA is gonna bitch up a storm about PSP sucking when $10 Tetris doesn't sell.

This is ridiculous, I'm guessing the devs figured that since they're on a dedicated gaming platform that they could charge more.

I wouldn't be surprised if publishers are having to raise their prices because Sony is taking a larger share of the profits for each game sold.

Costs are higher to develop on a PSP than on the iPhone. If you already have access to an iPhone, you can build, test and deploy an app on several iPhones for the $100 cost of a developer subscription, and you make that back by receiving 70% of the sales. If you've got a PSP you want to release a game for, that's 15 times the cost to get your hands on a single devkit, $1500. This cost is after the most recent price drop: http://www.next-gen.biz/news/sony-drops-psp-development-tool-costs I'm not sure what cut the developer receives of the profits though, that can be a factor as well.

Maybe sony should drop the price of the fucking dev kit so developers can lower the price a bit.

Given what other people have mentioned about the price of a dev kit and that we don't know how much money Sony is taking off the top of every sale it's a bit factitious for Sony to say "they can charge whatever they want." Sure, they could set the price really low but is it commercially viable for them to do that right now with the development environment that Sony is creating? If Sony truly wants to compete they have to make the price of entry for developers just as low, especially when you're talking about taking on something like Apple's App Store which has generated an enormous amount of excitement in the development community and has so much of a head start.

Makes me glad I don't have a PSP, or an iPhone, but then again I don't get the appeal of portable gaming. Get away from video games for a while. Don't you have enough of them at home. Listen to some mp3's, or god forbid read a book.

Sorry for that little rant. As for the mini's. Aren't they restricted to 100mb. If we take MGS4 which is somewhere around the 50GB mark. I can pick this up for around £20 now brand new. If I do the maths, then 100mb should cost about 4 of our fine British pence. Even if we go buy a full £45 game using 10GB disc space as a comparison it still only works out at 45 pence for 100mb. I know that's taking it very literally pricewise, but just making a point.

Yeah, they could be a tad overpriced.

Do the Sony executives think that we're all retarded? You guys could of just set a price limit, like Nintendo did on the Wii, and DSi. No game is over $8 on DSiWare and they go down to $2, so why couldn't Sony have done the same thing? Its their system, so just don't leave it up to the developers to set the price.

Sony often leaves pricing up to the Developers/Content Providers. While that can help attract more content it often has the unfortunate side effect of pricing that's out of line with consumer expectations.

Remember UMD movies? Sony launched the PSP and said, here you go studios, another way to sell your movies and we won't set the prices, you will. Look how well that worked out. Movie studios were still high on massive DVD sales and saw this as another opportunity to get consumers to buy everything all over again. Instead of setting realistic pricing or using clever marketing strategies like say, including a UMD with a DVD for a small price increase over the DVD alone, they pumped out bare bones releases that often times cost more than the DVD counterpart which had a ton of extras.

While it makes business sense on one hand for Sony to attract developers/content providers in this way, we've seen that greed will usually get in the way of reality. Minis will likely go through an adjustment period where a variety of pricing will be tried out and eventually things will settle to a level where the price more accurately reflects the value.

That being said, I'm sure EA is selling plenty of copies of Tetris even at $9.99 simply because there isn't a whole lot of choice in the Minis category at the moment and Tetris is a game that everyone knows and loves. It's basically a safe bet. Remember that not everyone has an iPhone and even a fair number of people with iPhones (myself included) don't use it as a gaming platform at all for one simple reason, controls (or lack thereof).

yeah...there has to be a reduce in profit. whether that's sony taking too much compared to Apple or whether its just the dev costs, somethings fishy. Blaming devs without any reason other than to say "hey we don't know why they want to double apple's price on our console, they just must be greedy" is a bit lame.

of course they haven't actually said anything like that. Its just the way the article has pointed me. They said this as well: "I think they have to carefully look at that, carefully price their content. Minis was intended to be something a little different and we wanted to see a lot of different types of content through minis. If it's not priced correctly, consumers may be turned off at the proposition and say 'I'd rather just go for this kind of stuff instead of minis.'" which makes me believe that they realize its overpriced and they want to caution the developers through a small interview that nobody is going to read in Joystiq.

Well, considering iPhone games are grab-n-go mentality for most users and a few bucks for a game is a no-brainer. Now, if we know what Sony offers the developer as far as profit (Apple gives 60% of all sales to the dev of any app), then maybe we'll have our answer. My guess is Sony takes a larger chunk of the pie--or at least their publishing fee for putting in up on the PSN store, which in turn would explain the higher price point for the same game. Sony gets greedy, the publishers have to raise the cost to justify selling it.