[quote name='metallicoholic']I definitely agree with Shipwreck about the memory stick pricing. While it's true that the pricing/size of the sticks won't matter much to people buying the physical copies of the game, part of the appeal of the Vita is the ability to download full retail games. Of course people are going to want to take advantage of that and I wonder how many of those people will understand how much room they're going to need in order to do so. I think with the recent surge in iPhone/Android games, a lot of people take for granted not having to think about memory when it comes to purchasing games online. I'm curious to see how well the Vita does in the next couple of months once more games are released and the public realizes how much money they need to invest in memory sticks.[/QUOTE]
There are a few ways to look at the Vita memory pricing. As I mentioned before, the actual price of entry is just an additional $20. That's not too bad in absolute sense. I also mentioned that the memory pricing isn't bad compared to non-expandable memory pricing on iPhones/iPads, nor the kind of HDD upgrade pricing Microsoft has been charging with the Xbox this whole generation. In fact, right now an extra $50 will get you both 3G and 8GBs of storage. From Apple that would be a $230 upgrade.
But there are a couple technical reasons they went proprietary. First of all, since all games need to be playable as a download from flash storage, Sony needs to guarantee a certain level of performance for the memory cards. Think the WipEout load times are bad now? Imagine the same game if you were trying to play it off a slow as shit bargain MicroSD card at 2 MB per second. Sure, you got 32 GBs for $30, but if it takes 6 minutes to load a race, what's the point? Sony's pricing isn't that far off high performance flash memory.
Second, Sony needs to protect this device from piracy. They cannot afford to have everyone playing everything for free like the PSP. The size of the Vita memory cards is specifically designed to be too small for a MicroSD to be practical, thereby hopefully providing a barrier to people trying to load arbitrary data on to the device, or examine data created and stored for the Vita from a PC.
Technicals aside, you can just look at it like this. If the convenience and utility of a large Vita memory card is of value to people, they will be willing to pay for it. If people can bring themselves to pay $50 or $60 a year for Xbox Live (well, ~$35 a year for CAGgers), when MS is literally just lifting artificial locks on their ability to use their own hardware, internet connections and paid third party services, paying $20-100 for a physical chunk of memory should not be that big a deal.
I'm not disagreeing that having some amount of flash built in would have been nice, but I think a starting price of $250 with the choice to spend between $20-100 for memory is preferable to Sony packing in 8 or 16GB and moving the Wifi only price up to $299.