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Sony’s upcoming successor to the PSP is called the NGP, and it’s quite an amazing little machine, capable of easily pumping out PS3-quality graphics. Its hardware capabilities, though, imply a heavy cost to consumers… an implication hardly eradicated by Sony’s own reticence in talking price.
According to a recent interview, as amazing as the NGP is hardware-wise, it could have been even cooler… if price had been no object.
“There were elements that we found pretty cool, but had to set aside to remain on target,” Sony Computer Entertainment worldwide studios boss Shuhei Yoshida told Edge. “It’s a big lesson we learnt from the PS3. There’s no point putting everything you want into a device and doing the math later.”
According to Yoshida, Sony learned a lot from their failures selling the PS3 when it first launched costing $599. Sony had to keep on stripping out features over time in order to make the console’s price palatable…. a strategy which ended up resulting in a lot of backlash from gamers (specifically over backwards compatibility).
For the NGP, Sony decided to do all of the feature-stripping before the device was officially announced.
“We had to sell something that people could buy,” said Yoshida, adding that Sony “can’t sell the NGP for the same price as a PSP”.
All of this implies that as expensive as the NGP looks on paper, it’s probably going to be priced competitively with the Nintendo 3DS. We recently reported that Gamespot was teasing the NGP at a launch price of $299.99, or just $50 more expensive than the 3DS. If Yoshida’s thoughts on the matter are anything to go by, it seems like Sony is doing everything they can to make Gamespot’s price point accurate.
