Lik-Sang Goes Down; Takes SCEE with it
According to a press release on their website, Lik-sang.com is officially out of business due to several lawsuits brought to London’s High Court by Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe (SCEE).
The basis of the lawsuits was that Lik-sang should not be able to export Asian and other non-European-only hardware and software to Europe. The lawsuits were over the PSP, but ostensibly, Sony was doing this to stop a flood of PS3′s from getting into Europe from already-supply-starved markets elsewhere.
Well, Lik-sang gets the last laugh, alleging that several SCEE execs purchased PSP imports from their site.
Furthermore, Sony have failed to disclose to the London High Court that not only the world wide gaming community in more than 100 countries relied on Lik-Sang for their gaming needs, but also Sony Europe’s very own top directors repeatedly got their Sony PSP hard or software imports in nicely packed Lik-Sang parcels with free Lik-Sang Mugs or Lik-Sang Badge Holders, starting just two days after Japan’s official release, as early as 14th of December 2004 (more than nine months earlier than the legal action). The list of PSP related Sony Europe orders reads like the who’s who of the videogames industry, and includes Ray Maguire (Managing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Alan Duncan (UK Marketing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Chris Sorrell (Creative Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Rob Parkin (Development Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited), just to name a few.
This is just too delicious. Sony wants to curb capitalism for everyone else, even when they themselves have taken advantage of it.
Sony must’ve done something really bad to garner this much bad luck. Sony, here’s some free advice. Try the same thing that Earl is doing on the popular TV show, “My Name is Earl”. Make a list of all the mean things you’ve done, and go to each victim and try to fix it and make it better. Then, maybe this endless string of bad PR, recalls, and missed shipping targets will go away.
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You know, if Sony was my company I’d close their ass down too. Can’t blame them.
Play-Asia it is.
I hate Europe. Just beacuse of their stupid laws it’s affecting us in the Americas. You suck, land mass called Europe!
This is the sort of artificial price discrimination that games manufacturers try to pull with region-encoding. I think it’s insane that it’s actually upheld by the law in Europe!
Hopefully, Lik-Sang will quickly return with new owners (that won’t ship to Europe). Remember that this happened before with Nintendo. Nintendo basically shutdown Lik-Sang for selling “homebrew” devices for the Gameboy. Lik-Sang closed, but reappeared soon-after with backup devices and modchips removed from their product list.
Yes, it’s awful for our friends in Europe, but the rest of the world (where parallel importing isn’t illegal) shouldn’t have to suffer as well!
Noooooo! Lik-Sang out of business?! But what about the non-illegal stuff they sell? Argh!
I will never buy a Sony product again. Now I have every reason to never play PSP again. Most of the PSP games I own came from Japan only release. I’m not paying $20 more to get it from playasia.com. Those guys suck. Now they will probably jack the prices up more because they are the ONLY website to get the new releases from Japan.