There’s an interesting feature over on Edge Online about independent retailers and their thoughts on the PSP Go and the simple fact of the matter is that they’re worried. They’re worried that the relatively small – but stable – stream of income that the handheld currently supplies will vanish when the digital-only console hits the shelves in October.

But will it? Read some thoughts over the jump.

According to Edge, two large independent retailers – not quite in the realms of your GAMEs and GameStations and whatnot – have not received a single pre-order for the PSP Go since it was officially announced at E3 earlier this month. Ouch. One of the retailer’s heads expressed their worries at this, wondering if it’s even worth stocking the console if there isn’t even a single early adopter ready to put their money down the moment it is announced.

To be fair, the PSP Go hasn’t been officially priced in the UK yet (the closest price approximation being €249, or a shade under £215 by today’s going rates) and so people will be waiting to see what the official line is before they phone up their nearest gaming store. Heck, I didn’t even know I could pre-order a PSP Go until the price had been made clear by the folks at Sony.

Of course, it probably will be around £215, which is a lot of money. The original PSP retailed in the UK for £180 and currently sells for £130. With some cheap 16GB flash memory put in place of a UMD drive and a mass-produced M2 slot stuck in the side, I want to know where the extra cost is coming from as those aren’t hugely expensive components.

What’s really worrying the indie retailers is how they’re going to make any money from the PSP Go. Most retailers’ profiteering is based on the “razor/razor blade” model; little-to-no money is made from the sale of the console and most of it is made from selling stacks and stacks of games in the same way that razors are sold pretty cheap but the replacement blades are always expensive as heck.

Think about it: there’ll be a sliver of cash from selling PSP Go consoles (depending on how much Sony sell them to retailers for) and then there’ll be nothing else unless we see digital vouchers being sold in stores as we’ve seen already with Patapon 2. Hopefully Sony – and other publishers – will continue this sort of distribution service with more games as they’re released so that stores can continue to profit fairly from the PSP as they should be.

Of course, there are other channels of profit for stores to go down: Memory Sticks, carry cases and, should Sony ever see sense, PlayStation Network cards. PSN cards have been doing the rounds in the US for a long time and have just hit Canada too; how long until Europe sees them too?

At the moment, the PSP is looking a little like a retail disaster in the making for Sony. People aren’t interested and they won’t be if the price is too high and if they can’t just wander into a shop and pick up a code for a game at the very least. As for the retailers? It’s looking just as grim unless Sony get their act together and sort out a fair, equal business model for the people that actually sell their products.

Source: Edge Online

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