Another headache for Sony: falling PSP sales

[mesosade]

lol why am i not surprised. SONY are really tripping over thier own feet. OH and thnk goodness that bloody spammer ain't here

[PSPCulture]

Hey Sony! Guess What’s up? You’re so screwed!

I won't be buying a ps3 due to link sang! There seems to be a lot of pissed off people out there! HUH? Sony!

I am just one of those people who are boycotting your products, I was thinking of buying one of your big screen TV’s but that definitely is not going to happen now!

Guess what, Sony really doesn't care if you boycott its products or not - in reality you are very small fish in a very large pond of people spending enormous amounts of money on electronic consumer products. Ok, so you buying brand A instead of brand Sony should hurt Sony's bottom line, but the chances are you'll still be buying a product that contains some elements of technology that Sony has licensed out to third party manufacturers.

Now lets talk about what you can do to increase sales, what will work and what won’t. Consider this, I bought a PSP so I can play older computer games on the Go like Commodore 64 and Apple stuff. Stuff I liked when I was a kid! In addition to playing these games I bought quite a few UMD’s just because I already had your PSP system.

Unfortunately for you I can’t play all of the UMD’s out there because I won’t sacrifice the reason I originally bought the PSP for! I won’t update it ever!

Great, you spent a large sum of money on a product to be able to play 20+ year old games on it. At least you researched the electronic products available before buying your PSP, and I assume you decided that the PSP fitted in with your emulation plans perfectly. Which it does, because it does emulation and homebre wvery well.

(Or did you, because your second line contradicts this by saying you already had a PSP system? This means you purchased your PSP and then found out about emulation).

Either way, the majority of people purchasing PSP's today still have absolutely no idea about homebrew. Most people who own a PSP will never know about homebrew.

Wannna sell PSP’s Sony? Let us do what we want with the system. Let us use it’s full potential, and allow others to do the same! Stop what you are doing and allow the downgrading of the PSP allow homebrew to work on all PSP’s.

Take it from me, You won’t stop what’s going on but, sometimes it’s better to befriend your enemies in some cases than to try to destroy them. Join us and allow link-sang back into business and forgive and forget. Allowing homebrew and opening up new business avenues will only increase sales of the PSP propelling the system to new unexpected heights!

What you did to link-sang is nothing less than a shame, although, what we do or say won’t put you out of business, believe me you, it will hurt you! This is just the beginning, I promise!

Sony will never officially allow homebrew to exist, or in any way legitimise it, because it serves no purpose other than to remove potential income. If everyones busy playing pirated games on the PSP's, or playing 20+ year old emulated games, they are not out buying the games for the system that make Sony money.

Everyone talks about Sony like its some evil corporation, out to screw everybody over in an attempt to dominate the world with their consumer products. They are not. They are a corportation that has a single aim - to make money. If this means shutting down companies that are supplying products for less than the regional RRP, then thats what they will do. You and I can complain about the problems with Lik-Sang shutting down till the cows come home, but it isn't going to change the fact that Sony are protecting their revenue model.

The only thing that truely affects the sales of the PSP (and other relatively expensive toys) is the amount of money circulating in the economy. At the moment there are countries (USA, UK, most of Europe) that are seeing some economic slowdown and spiralling debt, where the amount of free cash becomes less and debt increase. In these situations, luxury items that are not essential are normally the first things to be canned from the shopping list.

If Sony really wants to sell more PSP's, it needs to cut the price by 40-50% in the run up to Christmas, and hope that the public can sustain its spending patterns and its increasing debt. A few decent games would be great as well, but its the cost of the system that is the issue, not the games, not the attempts to kill homebrew, not the closing of Lik-Sang.

[Vega]

It won't just come down to a Christmas Price cut. Many people have already made up their minds and will not get a PSP, and instead go for DS. Even if Sony cut the PSP price... DS is still very affordable. And now with Sony basically banning any type of imports... its only going to get worse for PSP.

As much as we all love our PSP's.... there comes a time when you have to face it... more people want / own a DS (or both)...

Shame the mainstream dont even get a taste of PSP homebrew... in my eyes... it makes all the difference.