Sony Responds to PSP Defect Complaints
A few thousand Japanese gamers are a tad upset.
If you paid £100 for a flawed product, you would probably be upset. A growing number of Japanese gamers have found themselves in this position. Sony has received more than 5,000 complaints from customers who claimed that their new PSP handhelds are defective.
Hardware defects are a fact of technological life and as videogame hardware becomes more complex the chances of something going awry increase. One of the principal complaints against the PSP is that the button positioned closest to the LCD screen is either defective or unresponsive - a claim Sony denies.
Sony president Ken Kutaragi got involved in the debate this week, saying that there was nothing wrong from a design point of view with what he described as "the most beautiful thing in the world".
Beautiful or not, the 5,000 defective PSPs represent less than 1 per cent of the 800,000 units that have already been sold. Kutaragi said that Sony would not be making any changes based on the complaints of a small group of dissatisfied gamers.
These charges come at an inopportune time for Sony. The company can ill afford bad press as it prepares to launch the PSP in Europe and North America over the next two months.
Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games