Value for money

Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has ruled out a PlayStation Vita price-drop this year. Speaking with Eurogamer.net, the affable executive noted that engineers are working hard to decrease the manufacturing cost of the platform – but admitted that it’s too early to reduce the system’s price tag.

"People like cheap or free,” he acknowledged. "Of course, cost reduction is one area our engineering team is working on. But we just launched the platform earlier this year. It takes time to do so.”

Yoshida explained that the platform holder is hoping to address the price concerns with value added bundles. Sony’s announced several hardware packages for the gift-giving period, featuring anticipated titles like LittleBigPlanet Vita, Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation and Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified.

But asked if it was too early for a price-drop, Yoshida responded: “It’s too early.”

Outside of price, the biggest challenge Vita faces is the somewhat unfair perception that the platform has no games. In actual fact, there’s a slew of content on the way for the system – but Yoshida admitted that releasing more titles is a number one priority for the platform holder.

"From our perspective, we were very pleased to launch with many titles. Many people said we had the strongest launch line-up for a PlayStation platform. But it's amazing how much more people want and how much content they consume," he continued.

"We designed PS Vita as a medium you can spend hours immersed into playing games. That means any amount of content can be potentially consumed pretty quickly. Also, we feel the expectations of people have changed since the launch of smartphone gaming. There is so much available in terms of variety and numbers.

"So we have to continue to work on bringing more content from big titles people are looking for in terms of franchises, to very small, snack-sized, intuitive casual games on the digital distribution side."

One area that Sony can significantly increase the amount of content available on the Vita is PlayStation Mobile. Yoshida added that the platform holder is “working hard to provide an ecosystem like the App Store, so small developers and even individuals can create content and publish on Vita as well as Android devices”.

Do you agree with Yoshida that it's too early for a Vita price-drop? Are you still disappointed with the upcoming software line-up? Let us know in the comments section below.

[source eurogamer.net]