Opinion: The reason PlayStation Store doesn’t work for PSP

Application stores are the big thing for manufacturers of consumer electronics. In fact, considering the collapse of hardware sales in the face of global recession you could argue that app stores will be the lifeline for manufacturers of consumer electronics.

Of course, the model everyone’s following is Apple's App Store for iPhone and iPod touch, which has pretty much single-handily revitalised the mobile games development space, much as Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade did a couple of years ago for console game developers and publishers.

So everyone’s piling into App Stores. Google's Android mobile platform has its Android Market, RIM the Blackberry Application Storefront, while Nokia and Microsoft will be rolling out the Ovi Store and Microsoft Marketplace respectively for their handsets.

Similarly even Nintendo, which has never been very revolutionary when it comes to the online distribution of media, has had its Wii Shop Channel for years and will be launching the DSi Shop in the US and Europe with the arrival of the DSi in April.

And then there's Sony...

Strangely, its PlayStation Store has quietly been around for years, launching in November 2006 for PlayStation 3, although only October 2008 for PSP. People are using it too: Sony claims 20 million registrations, and 380 million downloads generating $180 million of revenue.

But looking at the European PlayStation Store as a PSP owner, there's very little to get excited about. Of course, there are plenty of games. Indeed, we reckon 20 PSP games have been released via the store in 2009 - at least five times more than released through retail during the same period. The selection and pricing isn't very enticing though.

The worst example sees Ubisoft offering Tom Clancy's EndWar at £39.99, which is bizarre as you can buy it from GAME for £20. Things are a little better with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 - available for £15.99 - but, again, you can get it from GAME brand new for £14.97.

Indeed, far too many games are priced far too high: EA Replay at £15.99; Buzz! Master Quiz at £19.99; Fight Night Round 3 at £15.99. No wonder no one’s buying them.

Prices only drop with really old games - The Little Mermaid II for £3.99 - but even when budget publishers such as Midas release games you've never heard of, such Stateshift, Spectral vs. Generation, Generation of Chaos, you’re still being asked to pay £9.99.

Frankly, everyone may as well not bother. Thanks to the success of Apple’s App Store, if you want someone to buy a game they've never heard of, you now have to offer a free demo and at most expect to charge £5 for the full game.

Even Sony seems confused about its pricing model. There are some great games available to download. For example LocoRoco 2 (released just a couple of months ago) for £19.99 seems reasonable, until you realise you could buy a retail UMD on eBay for £16 (or £17.99 from GAME), play it for a couple of weeks/months and sell/trade it back, making the effective cost of playing the game no more than £10.

With such fragmentation of the retail model in operation, publishers urgently need to rethink their PlayStation Store pricing levels, especially when it comes to a portable console such as PSP, which is dying through a lack of games at a time when users of rival devices such as iPod touch are drowning in wave after wave of releases.

Indeed, as the platform holder Sony needs to be bold, take a lead and cut the price for all first-party titles sold via the PlayStation Store to, say, £10. There's a reason the majority of games on the App Store are sold at the lowest price point, and that's because they're cheap, impulse purchase.

In this case, however, Sony wouldn't even lose money on £10 sales, because that's around the cut it gets from retail sales anyhow. And just think how many more games it would sell.

On the other hand, if it does nothing to change the pricing model for games on the PlayStation Store, the future for PSP is beginning to look rather bleak.