GameStop releases Vita memory card prices for US

Ouch. I expect proprietry storage to cost more than a USB stick or SD, which seem to usually sell for around £1 per Gb at the moment, but essentially, if you were to buy a 3Gb game, this costs you a minimum of $20 (£15ish?) just for the memory to store it, and that's if you could afford $120 in one go, and games could well get bigger than that.
If they are serious about selling more games on download, I don't see how they can realistically keep these prices, and I would have thought game sales were more important than idiotic margins on memory cards.
It should be closer to $10, $15, $22 and $40

Posted:A year ago

Agreed, Andrew. As usual, it seems that we'll be shafted on the proprietary memory cards for a while. I'm hoping there's going to be a third-party solution, but I doubt it...

Posted:A year ago

Not to mention this system virtually requires them to do anything, due to the focus on digital.

In short, it's a money trap.

Posted:A year ago

Assuming these are similar spec to Class 10 SD Cards, the prices aren't that outlandish. Sony could subsidise these costs on the basis that if you have the storage you'll buy more games and maybe we'll see some memory card bundles early on based on that assessment, but to reiterate, those prices are pretty much the going rate for high speed, branded storage cards.

Posted:A year ago

Christopher, Class 10 SD cards are as much as 1/4th the price. These are prices at Newegg. The Class 10 cards I list below are actually rated much higher than class 10 and the UHS-1 cards are the new ultra high end spec. Sony's prices are just nuts.

UHS-1 cards:
8 GB = $28.99
16 GB = $54.99
32 GB = $59.99
64 GB = $99.99

Class 10 cards (average price - many were much lower):
8 GB = $10.99
16 GB = $19.99
32 GB = $39.99

Posted:A year ago

While it sucks from a consumer/price POV, I can understand the need for proprietary media in order to maintain some sort of control over user experience. There is a lot variance as to how SD/microSD cards perform in the real world compared to their classification.

As a general rule any of the class 10 cards generally perform great for things like music, movies, etc. However, many of them can be absolute dogs when it comes to random reads/writes, so they can have a negative impact if you are trying to run applications or an OS from them. In a lot of cases a Class 2 or Class 4 card from someone like Sandisk will perform better.

Posted:A year ago

I expect this will kill alot of sales of the Vita. These Cards aren't Class 10, from what I read they are no better then class 4.

Posted:A year ago