Nice review. Let's hope for some price drops...

I loved it on the PS3, and I'd go so far as to say that I would probably purchase it if I had a Vita. Like you said though, charging $40 for it is just plain ridiculous. As great as the game is, it still has the quality of a downloadable title, and there is no way this game should be sold for any price over $15.

Edit:
Is this the game that promised the PS3/Vita cross-platform play, or is it a different RPG that will be releasing soon?

--- Replying to BigBadBob113 -----

I think the game you're thinking of is Ruin — it's a hack-and-slash RPG and you can play the same save on both the Vita and the PS3. No clue what the pricing scheme for that game will be, though.

And while Dungeon Hunter Alliance has been decent fun on the PS3, there's no way in creation I'm paying close to three times as much for an essentially identical version on the Vita. UBI Soft can get stuffed as far as I'm concerned.

You guys are forgetting those of us that don't have both options. $40 is worthwhile to me, because I don't have a PS3.

Very few people cry foul when a game that's $30 on Steam shows up on Xbox 360 for $60. This is the same scenario, it just so happens that both of the platforms in question are branded the same.

That's what I was trying to get at. If the other versions DIDN'T exist at the price points they did - this would be a decent value. But they do, so that has to come into play.

--- Replying to txshurricane -----

I don't buy that argument, though.

First, how many games list at twice the price on XBL/PSN that they do on Steam? Most people understand that there's a moderate price premium for console games because of the overhead associated with console licensing and perhaps also due to whatever extra complexity is involved in console development. That's why a game that goes for $50 on the PC costs $60 on consoles even though the PC version is often at least nominally technically superior. Gamers may not like it, but I'd guess most of us understand it and accept that it's not a function of publishers being unfair and trying to screw us over.

Most gamers probably also understand that there's more flexibility on pricing and sales on Steam and other non-console storefronts than there is on consoles, such that prices do tend to drop more and faster over time on Steam and the like, and sales are often more frequent and more significant. So after a few months, yeah, a console game might still list for $60 and on Steam it might be going for $30… but it's also true that with a little effort, you can often find the several-months-old console version at a decent discount too, if still not as cheaply as on Steam.

And second, and more to the point, the developers and publishers of Dungeon Hunter Alliance themselves established that the base value of the game is such that on the PSN, it's worth $15. If you strip out the Sony- and console-related overhead, that means that they set the value of the game itself somewhere in the area of $10-12. There's no way that the overhead on producing a PS3 version is on the order of $3-5 but the overhead required to merely port that game to another Sony Playstation platform (which likely uses many of the same APIs and dev tools) and release it there magically rises to something like $28-30. The pricing difference is ludicrous. And so it looks like nothing more than an outrageously greedy attempt by UBI Soft to gouge gamers as much as they possibly can.

Granted, it is true that the PS3 version is only available for download while the Vita version is also available at retail, and retail distribution obviously does incur some additional overhead. Sony, however, has effectively set the retail overhead at 10% by discounting online versions of their games by that rate, and even if we assume they're keeping download prices artificially high to appease retailers and double that overhead fraction to 20%, retail distribution would still just account for $8 of Dungeon Hunter Alliance's cost on the Vita. Factoring in my earlier guesstimate for general console development and licensing overhead, that would yield a total retail+console overhead of $11-13 for the Vita release, meaning that we can therefore estimate that UBI is pretending that the Vita version of the game itself is magically worth about $27-29 to the PS3 version's $10-12 — despite the fact that they made no significant changes to the game.

In fact, their greed is even more blatant since, unlike many other publishers, they're not offering even the fairly modest 10% discount to people who download the game instead of buying it at retail, meaning that if you buy it on the PSN, you're actually spending more money than if you bought the retail version since you'll also need some expensive memory card space to store the game itself!

Maybe you think this sort of thing is fair, but I doubt many people will agree.

To be honest, Mac, most games are unfairly priced at retail. You shouldn't be so surprised about a Vita launch game that has an inflated price.

The PSP launched in North America at $250 with games for $50.

--- Replying to txshurricane -----

That may well be true, though I can't comment on PSP game pricing since I never owned a PSP — or a PS2, for that matter. But how often does a publisher charge one one amount for a game on one platform and 2.67 times that amount for a basically identical version of that game on another platform? That's the sort of extreme disparity that I don't think you see very often above a certain fairly low threshold. (I'm willing to believe, for example, that a game that costs $7 on iOS might reasonably cost $10 or $12 or maybe even $15 at the very outside on a console just because of the higher overhead associated with consoles and the smaller customer bases they offer, but once you start talking about games with significantly higher prices, that factor becomes much, much less significant.) Did the PSP have games that were basically identical to their PS2 counterparts while costing far, far more?

I kind of think we may be talking about different things — reasonable versus fair. I'm not sure it's reasonable for Golden Abyss to cost $50 (and I definitely think it's not wise) but I haven't played it yet, so I'm reserving judgement. (My Vita has just about finished slooooooooowwwwly copying stuff from my PS3, though, so that's about to change.) But if it offers a full Uncharted experience that feels like it's at least close to the value of the experiences offered by Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3, it won't be an unreasonable price… within the context of general game pricing. (In other words, the reasonableness or lack thereof of the general pricing of console games would be a separate issue.) If Golden Abyss is a cut-down, shortened and casual-ized spinoff of the franchise, though, the price will definitely feel unfair.

So to get back to Dungeon Hunter Alliance, the question of whether $15 is a reasonable price for it is one matter, but the grotesque disparity between its pricing on the PS3 and the Vita is an entirely different one, and all things considered, I think the Vita pricing is completely indefensible.

But enough of that — now it's time to play around with my Vita!

Perhaps this is a case of the publisher.

Gameloft publishes the PSN/iOS version.
Ubisoft the Vita.

--- Replying to bapenguin -----

Ah, I didn't realize that UBI wasn't involved in the PSN releases. That probably explains why the Vita's version of Lumines is so much more expensive than the PS3's too — turns out UBI Soft didn't publish Supernova. So this just further supports my earlier theory that UBI Soft is the real scumbucket here and the Vita publisher to avoid like the plague.