Rip-Off: Britain Claims PSP Victims

[wraggster]

If you're a UK gamer thinking about the PSP Giga Pack, don't expect the dream deal that America gets.

Still haven't picked up a PSP yet? Maybe you're thinking of adding it to your shopping list for Santa? If so, then chances are that you've considered the new Giga Pack option - but according to some customers and retailers, it might not be quite the dream purchase it could be.



Announced last month, the Sony Giga Pack is a special bundle in an attractive blue packaging design that comes with some great accessories, including a Vertical Stand for the main unit - useful for watching UMD movies - and vitally, a 1GB Memory Stick, offering much, much higher capacity for data, photo, music and video storage than afforded by the regular Value Pack's 32MB.

But some customers who've bought the recently released Giga Pack have come away disappointed at being forced to buy games they didn't want, simply because they have to come bundled with the Giga Pack.

Retailers selling the PSP claim they have no choice in the matter - that Sony's only making PSP Giga Packs available for sale to retailers who agree to sell customers the bundled option. For gamers, it means they might miss out on the games they really wanted to play on their PSPs this Christmas.

As one London-based game store explained to Kikizo: "We have to get the PSP Giga Packs in, and then bundle each one with World Tour Soccer and Pursuit Force. People are buying the bundle because it's the only option they have, and there aren't many regular packs around - but they're not happy about the games that come with it."

Often the situation has leads to pretty predictable, but drastic measures: "What we've seen is people trading them straight back in as soon as they buy it, and getting something popular like Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories in exchange."

In America, gamers are able to buy the Giga Pack with no bundled games and freely choose what they want to play, with the pack costing a mere $299USD. Helped along by the exchange rate at the moment, that's a mere £173. The cheapest game-bundled Giga Pack option in the UK is around £269 - just for the comparison, that's a whopping $462USD - enough to afford an Xbox 360 Premium System and a game with spare change for our friends across the pond.

Meanwhile, Japanese gamers are enjoying the slick new white edition PSPs - also available from friendly importers -featuring slightly improved manufacturing quality over the old black model.

Rip off Britain? Gamers will have to decide with their wallets - and their Christmas lists - in the busy shopping period.

[slayer2psp]

sony seems to hate the uk dont they. also there memory cards have less space on it i bought a sony 2gb it has 1860mb free on it just formatted and today i picked up a sandisk clear blue 2gb it has 1950 mb free on it thats 90mb more thats like 20 extra mp3 or 35min video i wonder why its like that oh well buy the sandisk

[Jdemon]

"Dream deal that America gets" is a bit off the mark if you ask me. We had close to the same situation here in the U.S. at the PSP launch. Granted, we did get to chose which 2 games we wanted (out of about 8 titles). And that was with the 32MB MS card, there were no 1GB MS cards in sight anywhere. You could only order them online and in most cases they were even backordered. I'm sure Sony also had a "deal" for Japanese customers at their launch too. It seems like alot of bitching and moaning about being treated unfairly when Sony treats all it's customers worldwide equally...like crap.