UK retailers are in-rage with the PSP GO, the new device hasn’t been even officially announce in Europe. The official UK price has yet to be revealed, but the leading national retailer Game is taking pre-orders at a “guide price” of £230, a significant jump over the average retail price of £100 for the current PSP. In fact that double the current PSP price, which could turn out to be even higher than the “guide price”.

The extremely high price may be scaring off customers, as independent shops are telling Edge some frightening pre-order stories. “I don’t have a single pre-order for PSP Go at the moment,” Chips’ Don McCabe told the outlet. “We haven’t got any [PSP Go pre-orders] at all,” repeated Grainger Games’ Chris Harwood. While the head of SCEE believes consumers will pay an early adopter premium, McCabe believes otherwise. But the fact the fact that surprises me is that Sony seems to have learn absolutely noting from the PS3, there is no reason to pay the premium for the PSP Go! “We can’t see where that price justification comes in when effectively it’s a lighter, slimmer PSP. It’s got a bit more memory, but memory’s not that expensive. It can’t handle UMD so part of the mechanism disappears, so where does the price come from?”

Retailers are not getting an added benefit for stocking the PSP Go. Margins on game hardware have been historically low and PSP Go looks to follow suit. In America, SCEA’s Eric Lempel noted retailers enthusiasm due to the sale PlayStation Network cards at retail. UK retail partners however currently don’t have an equivalent revenue source, a problem that is hindering retail enthusiasm. “You need to see some sort of revenue streams coming off the back of these machines, otherwise from a retail point of view it’s just not worth it,” said McCabe. Well so far the PSP GO is looking to turn into a massive failure, if Sony continue to misplay it cards.

[Via Joystiq]