Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified PS Vita bundle doesn’t include a physical copy of the game

Sony's Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified PS Vita bundle doesn't come with a physical copy of the game.

The Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified PS Vita bundle due out this fall could be just the item Sony needs to build moment behind its portable, but a new report suggests the package isn’t quite the value you might think it is.

Sony is aggressively pricing its consoles this holiday. The company introduced a brand new 250GB model of its six-year-old PlayStation 3 game console on Monday, but rather than drop the price of the machine, it actually raised it from $250 to $270, bundling a game in to justify the jump. The PlayStation Vita portable console, meanwhile, has reportedly sold just over 2 million units worldwide. Those are the sort of sales that forced Nintendo to slash the price of the Nintendo 3DS from $250 to $170 just months after its release in 2011, but Sony is sticking to its guns. No Vita price drop. Instead it’s releasing bundles with new games like Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation and Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified.

A new report from Videogamer, however, demonstrates that the $250 price tag on the Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified bundle isn’t too big of a money saver. The copy of Declassified that comes with the PS Vita isn’t a physical copy of the game, just a download voucher. Now a download voucher for a $50 game isn’t a negative. The game itself costs that much regardless of whether there’s a physical copy or not. The problem is that the bundle only comes with a 4GB proprietary memory stick for the system. While it’s unknown how much data Declassified takes up as a download, large Vita games can come close to filling that card. Uncharted: Golden Abyss for example eats up 2.7GB, while FIFA 13 eats up 2.8GB.

Declassified will likely be even bigger. Nihilistic, the studio making Declassified, already released one Vita shooter this year, namely Resistance: Burning Skies. That game takes up 3.1GB on a Vita memory card.

Were Sony’s memory cards for the Vita cheaper, the value trade would be balanced. Since an 8GB memory card will cost an additional $30, though, it still seems like Sony is cutting an unnecessary corner when it should be doing everything in its power to incentivize the purchase of a Vita.