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PSP Go Badly

The Comic Adventures of Hsu and Chan, Game Designers

by Norm Scott | Sep 28, 2009 6:18PM PST

A quick note for anybody confused upon their arrival, here -- the final part of "The Terrible Secret of the H&C Blog" will be going up Wednesday, Sep. 30, when it's more appropriate.

The PSP Go -- bold, new step into the future of gaming, or shameful, overpriced doo-dad from people who should know better?

The idea of a world without physical media is, honestly, a bit frightening to me -- and not just because, at the age of 31, I am now irredeemably old. Defenders of the idea will inevitably make comparisons to the MP3 market, which has pretty much replaced the CD market and which manages to thrive while at the same time remaining consumer-friendly.

Detractors, on the other hand, will point out that PSP games are considerably more expensive than MP3s. When your product only costs 99 cents a pop, it's frankly difficult to be consumer-unfriendly. Add in the fact that every game is going to be sold through the Playstation Network, and you've got a situation that is ultimately going to end up sitting on the consumers' heads.

Sony has, frankly, never been one to enjoy healthy competition. There's a reason Sony's Memory Sticks cost twice the amount that SD cards do for any given memory capacity. The Playstation Network, you see, is not merely an online marketing tool. The Playstation Network is every MP3 player Sony makes, every camera Sony sells, an ever-expanding catalog of stylish digital devices that require Sony-manufactured connectors, memory cards and batteries in order to function. It's 1984, but on a consumer scale.

Of course, this alone does not put Sony in a more-sinister position that any large-scale electronics manufacturer -- exploitation is at the heart of business. Where the PSP Go is going to push things into darker territory is in the elimination of a physical product.

Games stored on physical media have height, width, weight, and cost money for the materials needed to manufacture them. Digital downloads do not. Yet the very things that make physical media more expensive to deliver also ultimately makes them cheaper for the consumer.

In a retail environment, before you purchase your game from the store, the store has already purchased it from a distributor. In practical terms, that means that every game they have sitting in the stock room, taking up physical space, is a potential dead loss for the company. The only way to turn that loss around is to sell those games to the public.

Now, it's true that when you walk into a Gamestop looking for a new game, you wont necessarily sense this urgency on the store's part in either the pricing or the promotion of the games themselves (unless you count the quiet desperation in the eyes of the clerk trying to sell you a used copy of the same game that's been licked by a dog and melted on one side with a cigarette lighter, for five dollars off the MSRP). That's because when a game's new, people WANT to buy it, and are willing to pay the full retail price point.

Over time, however, demand will drop off, and the financial losses of the games in the stock room begin to cement themselves in reality. It is at this point that the store needs to make an effort to get those games out of the stock room, with the result being reduced prices. Let those reduced-price games sit and fester for a few years, with demand constantly dropping because of the used-game market, and the games enter the phase of life known as the Bargain Bin. The end result is that, with some looking, you can find a new PS3 copy of "Bioshock" going for all of five bucks.

And somehow, life goes on.

Now, I'm not against digital distribution. Steam, Direct 2 Drive, companies like Good Old Games, they all do a brisk business that manages to frequently offer excellent deals to consumers. The issue is that digital distribution removes most of the stimuli that require them to do so. Sony, with the PSP Go, is taking that one step further -- they eliminate physical stock, they eliminate the used game market, and perhaps most important of all, they eliminate any other source from which to purchase their product.

I'm not saying that Sony is inevitably going to screw the consumer... but, let's see those Memory Stick prices drop as a good-faith effort, how about?