Sticker shock at the register is a valid reason that people abandon purchases. Finding out that you need to pay more than you thought you would for a system to be able to store games isn't a pleasant feeling, I imagine.
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Which is crazy since you cant resell them and digital means Sony not having to worry about the cost for physical media.
It all seems so backwards to me.
They wouldn't even need to take a memory card to the register. You could have picked up one of the CoD/AssCreed bundles that came with a 8GB and a handful of physical games and you would have been able to enjoy all of them with space to spare.
The mentality that you need 32 or 64GB of on board memory to enjoy a Vita doesn't exist in the real world.
The Vita Memory Card Price is Unfair
I can't believe you actually spent time writing out a defense to Sony's ridiculous prices on these things.
They're too expensive - the end.
ITT everyone disagrees with the OP. Has there ever been such a start contrast in Neogaf history?!
Don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but to the OP: there was a Vita test model that leaked out that was using standard SD cards. Sony made a choice to make them proprietary to make more $$. End of story. ¯_(ツ_/¯
They wouldn't even need to take a memory card to the register. You could have picked up one of the CoD/AssCreed bundles that came with a 8GB and a handful of physical games and you would have been able to enjoy all of them with space to spare.
The mentality that you need 32 or 64GB of on board memory to enjoy a Vita doesn't exist in the real world.
Quick Amazon price check:
32GB Sandisk Ultra Class 10 SD Card: £9.95
32GB Vita Memory Card: £53.00
In what universe is any criticism unfair?
SanDisk Ultra microSDHC 128GB Memory Card with Adaptor. Price - £28.05
I firmly believe this to be troll thread. It has to be. That or OP suffers of some mental ailment. Anyway, moving on. Just gonna ignore it.
Huh? Of course it was a 'choice'. Prototypes often use 'standard' stuff before the proprietary stuff is developed, it's not 'evidence' of anything other than the standard development process.
OP is right that the price of the cards subsidized the Vita to some degree at launch. It was a bad decision, clearly, but Sony often succeeds at implementing new storage solutions and in this case they were obviously trying to remove as many piracy vectors from the Vita as possible.
Had the Vita been successful, the storage would have had higher production and become cheaper. Instead, it wasn't, so production remained niche and overly pricey.
It was definitely a mistake to have proprietary cards, but again, I'm absolutely sure the engineers had a mandate to remove every piracy vector possible. The idea that it was 'greed' is overly simplistic and doesn't really address the reason they used proprietary cards at all.
OP's post is odd, but I think he was just trying to say if they didn't have removable memory that people wouldn't have balked as much at the price. I think he's wrong, but so are many people in this thread that aren't even trying to understand what brought Sony to make the decision they did in the first place.
I think the reason Sony used it's own format for vita memory cards is to stop piracy. It seemed to work. They only recently have started to dump games. They had to use a ProDuo to vita memory card adapter to do it. If it hadn't been for that adapter vita could have still been secure. Nintendo 3ds used sd cards and look how quickly 3ds got hacked.
The Vita was liable to be an inherently expensive system and to me it seems like the memory card approach was intended to split the cost of that system. Most likely allowing them to reduce margins on the console.
If people weren't complaining about the cost of the memory cards they would have been complaining about the cost of the system as a whole, and Sony wanted to differ that complaint regarding the system pricing, away from the core hardware.
In either case it's unlikely it resulted in a significant increase in the cost to the consumer, as it would have resulted in increased margins being placed on the system itself.
Since then however, in Europe at the very least, the mega pack and other bundles are very affordable anyway. You can buy a 16 GB memory card that comes with 8 games (PSP and Vita) for £40. I don't think that's bad value and there are lots of different bundles. There's one with 5 lego games, one with a load of action games, one with LBP and a load of other stuff.
Ultimately it launched as a premium system but it's pretty affordable now, as with many previous console failures (Dreamcast, Wii U) what let the Vita down was its overall eventual lineup and third party support. It has some good titles but it doesn't feature a robust lineup of high quality titles that its competition does. I'm not saying you shouldn't own one, but if you were only going to own one handheld then you miss out on more by not owning a 3DS, and that's the issue.
Plus, the Vita's premium price was appealing to the slightly more adult, teenager and college student market, but the problem that I see is that all of those people are absorbed into games like Smash Bros and Pokemon. Those games dominated their early childhood and games like Lumines, Rayman and Ninja Gaiden, while great games in their own right, are available elsewhere and simply not system sellers. Since then, Sony failed to secure or create any of the big IPs required to draw everyone's attention.
Had the Vita succeeded, the memory prices would have become cheaper with time as production increased, but this didn't happen as the system didn't gain the traction anticipated. However that responsibility is more to do with software and marketing than anything else, in my opinion.
So yeah I agree with the OP to a degree, memory cards weren't the issue. People see them as being expensive but neglect that that cost is intentionally differed away from the hardware. It's like people that complain about postage prices on ebay when the seller is selling the item for half the price of everyone else. Surely you can grasp the idea that they might not have the highest margin on the main item?
Now here are the Vita Memory Card Prices I got from Amazon.
8GB: $28
16GB: $42
32GB: $58
64GB: $107
The price of the Vita on Amazon is $153. If you were to buy the system together with a memory card just like an iphone the costs would be -
8GB: $181
16GB: $195 (7% more than the Vita system + 8GB card)
32GB: $211 (16% more)
64GB: $260 (43% more)
Guess the OP has never heard of Android phones. My Note can have massive memory upgrades for a few dollars on a micro SD card.
The prices were and still are ridiculous. Also, I bought the Vita DAY ONE...not years down the road when it's cheaper X-D.
I'd rather pay a bit more up front and have cheap memory options.
Side note Apple's markups are sickening. I've liked my iPhones (have had 4 generations), but they're massive ripoffs tech wise.
The iPhone, and frankly all phones for the past several years use storage that completely destroys the Vita in speed and performance too so fuck that.Also the iPhone comparisons... smh.
Vita is not the iPhone. Literally everyone uses a smartphone these days, and people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars every year to get a new iPhone.
The comparison isn't valid not only because of those aspects though. That's just the beginning of why the comparison is useless. People aren't lining up for Vita's as a status accessory.
If people weren't complaining about the cost of the memory cards they would have been complaining about the cost of the system as a whole, and Sony wanted to differ that complaint regarding the system pricing, away from the core hardware.
The Vita was too expensive as a handheld.
It's a portable PS3. What'd ya expect?
Edit: I also don't get why people complain you gotta buy a memory card with the Vita when you gotta buy a Hard Drive with the WiiU. If you don't you can't even update Smash Bros. And it won't let you use a SD card instead of a Hard Drive either.
It's a portable PS3. What'd ya expect?
Edit: I also don't get why people complain you gotta buy a memory card with the Vita when you gotta buy a Hard Drive with the WiiU. If you don't you can't even update Smash Bros. And it won't let you use a SD card instead of a Hard Drive either.
It's a portable PS3. What'd ya expect?
Edit: I also don't get why people complain you gotta buy a memory card with the Vita when you gotta buy a Hard Drive with the WiiU. If you don't you can't even update Smash Bros on the 8 gb models. And it won't let you use a SD card instead of a Hard Drive either.
This is honestly just delusional.
They're marked up SD cards that are more or less mandatory for the system. Biggest reason why I never got a Vita despite it having a largely solid library.
So yeah, by all accounts and figures they suck and should not even exist.