PlayStation Mini? Gimme!

I like the choice of titles, but I already own many of them. I would have liked to see others in there. If Brave Fencer Musashi had been added, I'd have bought it for that alone. Guess I'll just have to procure a copy of it through other means. I so hate that my original disc got messed up a long, long time ago. Maybe it's time I hit ebay...

So this thing appears to have bombed. I noticed last week Amazon was offering it for $75 with a $25 gift card, so essentially $50. It’s now been cut to $60 at all outlets.

Thoughts on why it failed at retail? All I know about the reception is that Giantbomb didn’t like that it had some European game versions and some North American versions. I don’t think the average consumer knows that. I didn’t think it would do as well as Nintendo’s versions, but I didn’t expect a 40% price cut within a month or so.

The game lineup largely fails to excite, and word got out pretty quickly that the games didn't perform all that well. Coupled with a high price, I'm not surprised that it's tanked.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

The game lineup largely fails to excite, and word got out pretty quickly that the games didn't perform all that well. Coupled with a high price, I'm not surprised that it's tanked.

All of this. It launched at $100 compared to the $80 SNES Classic and the $60 NES classic. I guess they thought they could charge an extra $20 because it was the next console generation, despite having a lesser lineup of games.

The emulation is garbage. Shame on Sony. On some games it's disastrous but every game suffers from some kind of issue.

Plus they released PAL versions of some games randomly on a machine that is locked to 60hz. This has to be one of the lowest effort offerings from a major game manufacturer. The definition of a cynical cash grab.

The hardware team did the job but the software team failed miserably. My less powerful Super Famicom Mini plays the same games better.

I'm a firm believer that buyers look at games before they look at hardware performance or power, so this stands out to me, from Wikipedia:

The most popular franchise on PlayStation is Tomb Raider (25.9 million combined units), followed by Final Fantasy (24.15 million units), Crash Bandicoot (21.79 million units) and Gran Turismo (20.22 million units).

Only one of those franchises—Final Fantasy—was included and only by a single game. Final Fantasy VII was the second best-selling game on the hardware, so it's a good pick, but VIII, IX, and Tactics were all also in the top twenty. Not including Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, or Gran Turismo at all likely killed the product for most buyers. It's really hard to appeal to people's nostalgia if you don't include the things they're nostalgic for.

I've seen a lot of commentary about why some games couldn't be included, and most of them boil down to licensing or not wanting to compete with remasters and remakes, but whatever the real reasons were, they're what sunk the thing. Sony thought they could win the day without them, and that's proving to be a mistake.

I can't speak to PS fans as a whole, but I thought the game list was interesting. However, in need of a lot of tweaking. I actually like having smaller titles like Intelligent Qube and Wild Arms on there. Turning it into an FF box would have been good for sales, no doubt. No Wipeout is bad. People seem to think Twisted Metal and Ridge Racer should have been different entries in the series. I'd do Persona 2: Eternal Punishment instead of the first. Gran Turismo as a name is good but I wouldn't want to play it now. Even back in the day it seemed to be struggling to fit within what the PS1 hardware could do. If they can get Konami to put on MGS, why not Suikoden II, Silent Hill? Thinking about it, other than tweaking the chosen entries in a few of the series, I wouldn't necessarily want them to take any games out. I'd rather they just pad it out to 30-40 games! Now that would have been sweet.

Regardless of all that, if someone ends up hacking the box then I might still be interested in purchasing it!

I think it's already possible to hack it (according to some of the YouTube videos I've seen). Not sure if it's actually as easy to do as it is for the SNES Classic though.

bobbywatson wrote:

I think it's already possible to hack it (according to some of the YouTube videos I've seen). Not sure if it's actually as easy to do as it is for the SNES Classic though.

It is supposed to be particularly easy to hack - modders say Sony really left it easy, dropping the ball, in a way -so that, I think, could be a way for it to sell unintentionally. I have to confess that it's one of the things that have made me consider getting it. However, my old PSOne still works, so I may be better off finding used copies of what games I want that haven't been released digitally.

Blind_Evil wrote:

So this thing appears to have bombed. I noticed last week Amazon was offering it for $75 with a $25 gift card, so essentially $50. It’s now been cut to $60 at all outlets.

Thoughts on why it failed at retail?

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm a firm believer that buyers look at games before they look at hardware performance or power

I agree with this assessment. Nerds like us who really care about getting the emulation right and discuss it online are a minority. Nintendo did a better job picking out games that would have nostalgic appeal to impulse buyers in store, or people looking for a holiday gift, who probably made up the majority.

It probably helps that Nintendo owns some very popular properties, while the PS1's most popular games (which often still don't have the cache of Mario or Zelda) were often third party.

brokenclavicle wrote:

It is supposed to be particularly easy to hack - modders say Sony really left it easy, dropping the ball, in a way -so that, I think, could be a way for it to sell unintentionally.

I suspect the same. This way they make the "nerds like us" sales without having to pay to license as much, as long as they "don't notice" hackers.