Retail ‘rebelled’ against PSPgo

There are lots of opinions about why the PSPgo failed to establish itself in the market, but GamesBrief analyst Nicholas Lovell believes it’s rocky relationship with retail was the chief cause of its commercial struggles.

News broke earlier this week that the handheld has been discontinued by Sony.

"The death of the PSPgo highlights the problems faced by hardware manufacturers in their relationship with retail," he told Eurogamer.

"Sony needs retailers to sell its hardware; it also knows that the future of software is downloadable. In a world of downloadable software, physical retailers are vastly less important, and this terrifies them.

"So Sony tried to launch a product that needed retail support to shift units, then cut them out of the value chain by selling games directly to the consumer. The retailers rebelled."

US analyst Michael Pachter added that the machine’s RRP, which until the end of its life consistently tracked at around 100 more than the standard UMD model, was another huge factor.

"It was a flop because it wasn’t sufficiently differentiated from the PSP-3000 to justify the much higher price," he added.

"There’s not a lot to say about PSPgo. The feature set was cool, but not cool enough. The download-only mechanism was not as attractive as they thought it would be. The form factor, while nice, wasn’t worth an extra $80."