14 DAY TRIAL // One of the leading executives working at Sony has announced that, despite the price cut that Nintendo has enacted for the 3DS handheld, his company has no plans to modify the price point of the upcoming PlayStation Vita.
The new Sony mobile gaming platform, which launches before the end of the year in Japan and in early 2012 in the West, will be costing gamers the equivalent of 249.99 dollars for the Wi-Fi only version and 50 dollars more if they are also interesting in 3G plus service.
The Nintendo 3DS is now priced at 169 dollars or the equivalent in local currency and the cut has pushed up sales on the Japanese market, where the device has managed to move more than 100,000 units for two consecutive weeks.
Shuhei Yoshida, who is the executive in charge of the Sony World Wide studios, has told Eurogamer as part of a bigger interview that, “We are totally happy with the price we put.”
He added, “Personally, I was expecting Nintendo might move their price, but I wasn't expecting them to move at this time. We didn't price Vita relative to 3DS or those other devices. We plan the value we want to put in to the Vita and the price people would perceive the value would be. Nothing changed since the announcement. We are totally happy.”
A number of analysts have suggested that Sony needs to cut the launch price of the Vita in order to make it competitive.
Instead the company has chosen to reduce the price for the PlayStation 3 home gaming consoles.
The hardware maker says that the initial customer base for the PlayStation Vita is not making its decisions based only on price, but on the level of gaming performance that the games launching for the device will deliver.
A price cut could arrive if the device fails to meet its sales targets.