Just in time for the launch of the PSP Go, several Nippon Ichi Software of America titles will be available for download via PlayStation Network. These titles include fan-favorites Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, Prinny: Can I really be the hero?, with other titles hinted to join them. As a special promotion, the games will be priced for “half off” (that is, $12.99 and under) starting October 1st and extending through that week.

Hold on a second.

This means that once the promotion ends, these games return to their normal price of about $25.99, correct? As I write this, I can buy hard copies of those games for the same price at retail. As I asked in my Secondhand Rant, isn’t the main selling point of digital distribution passing the savings of production costs on to the consumers? If the digital copy is priced the same as the physical copy, where’s the incentive? What am I missing?

Of course PSP Go owners aren’t able to play the UMD versions of the games, but then that’s the whole idea. If the entertainment industries can transition digital distribution from a low-cost alternative to the standard, they can go back to charging whatever they want. Worse, they’ll be able to justify it if they can eliminate the secondhand market, since they’ll then gain a monopoly over access to multimedia.

I do give big props to NIS America and Sony for finally having some kind of sale on the PlayStation Store. I can only hope that they learn the same lesson as Valve–that being if you discount the price, sales will greatly increase. Weekly sales would be welcomed by their consumer base and God knows I might just use the service myself more often.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Business, Games, RPGs, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.