Game Importer Lik-Sang Out of Business

[American Oyaji]

Sony is shooting themselves in both feet these days.

I mean, if Lik-Sang BUYS the consoles wholesale and sells them online, that isn't cutting into Sony's business, is it?

And the PS3 will be a fiasco. I smell blood in the video game market waters.

[jingai]

Sony is shooting themselves in both feet these days.

I mean, if Lik-Sang BUYS the consoles wholesale and sells them online, that isn't cutting into Sony's business, is it?

And the PS3 will be a fiasco. I smell blood in the video game market waters.

Probably increasing their profits as Lik-Sang supports a niche (non-Japanese who want Japanese versions of hardware and games) that Sony doesn't attempt to fill. The prices at Lik-Sang were high enough that it wasn't as if people were using it to save money. Sony's probably mad about violating the principle of regional markets and wants to keep the Asian unit profits coming from Asians, America from Americans, etc.

[Kuang_Grade]

The crux of the issue was that Lik-Sang, while buying J Hardware units at standard J prices, was selling them in the EU, where Sony's hardware prices are usually substantially higher than in Japan. As a result, Lik-Sang could undercut Sony's own prices in Europe by selling J hardware (Lik Sang also sold them months BEFORE Sony had released the PSP in the EU) and still make a profit. Sony's EU retail partners were rather upset about this and Sony worried if it continued, it might upset their overall efforts in the EU (retailers would be less interesting in stocking the PSP, developers would see low EU PSP sales (because people bought J PSPs instead) and not make games for the EU market, ect, ect). Had Sony fully region coded the PSP, this would have not been such a issue, but since it is not region coded for games (only UMD movies), J PSPs work on any PSP game in in any market. I believe the issue is only over the Lik-Sang's sale of hardware, not software......Sony doesn't have a much to do with the games directly beyond making sure they work and don't have super serious content issues....otherwise, as long as the publisher pays the PS2 royalty fees, I don't think Sony cares at all about what game was sold to who ever, where ever..

This hadn't come up before because the market for J PS2 hardware in the US or the EU is exceptionally small...It was the lack of region coding on the PSP that brought the issue to boil and its been said that the PS3 is region free for games as well, so Sony definitely had a dog in this fight with the PS3 launch coming up in a few weeks.

[amdg]

Yeah, it's called Parallel Importing and it's totally legal...... in Japan..