They can TRY and charge more, but they're within a stones throw of a real game. And I won't have to try very hard to pass em over. Actually, screw that. I mean PSP Minis should cost, AT MOST, the same price as a new RB Unplugged track.

How muck is a psp dev kit? I know that the iPhone dev kit is a measly 100 bucks or so

I totally agree with you, the prices of minis are way too expensive, if they think I'm going to pay 6 dollars for fieldrunners when I can buy silent hill for the same price, they're kidding themselves. I do wish I had that PSPgo though, or that they add the save state feature via firmware, that would make it alot easier to play it on the bus.

Has there been any news about Sony expanding the PS store's library of games? I really want to play Crisis Core and right now you can't download it. I feel like I'm being punished by Sony for buying their latest product.

The problem with the iPhone is that they are only worth buying if they are on sale. The iPhone business model is to sell it expensive for awhile, reel in the suckers, and then drop the price to $1.99. I've come to the point where I'd rather wait for the inevitable deal.

But it comes down to quality. Field Runners for instance is worth $7, I paid a similar price when it was originally launched on the iPhone. Some games however are absolutely not worth it even on the iPhone; absolute shovelware.

Regardless, at the moment there are only like a half-dozen PSP Minis games.

The fact that to obtain an iPhone you need to either pay the price of a good laptop or an expensive contract with a TelCo is never considered, it seems. Is it that different in the US?

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.