It seems Sony is asking gamers what they think of the PSP, which means Sony has no idea what it wants the PSP to be. Do you use it for gaming exclusively, or do you also use it as a media player? Do you exclusively use it as a media player? Will you please buy 10 PSPs and five games per system so we don’t close a bunch of divisions? And so on.
Edge, as always, has a pretty keen examination on the state of the PSP, such as it is. It attempts to answer many of those very questions. You can read the whole thing (and you should, it’s pretty good), but in a nutshell: Sony needs to put less emphasis on the the PSP’s media capabilities and focus on making it a successful gaming machine. Four years after its introduction, and despite several hardware revisions, it’s not the sleek piece of hardware it once was; the iPhone is the new shiny object of desire, and it, too, plays movies and music, so there’s no use in try to market the PSP as a media device. Sony needs to update it: make it smaller, maybe add a touchscreen, etc. That’s the basic argument, and one that’s hard to argue against.
As I mentioned yesterday, it’s not like the PSP doesn’t have any games worth playing. Games like WipeOut: Pulse, Crisis Core and God of War are good clean fun. I don’t know, maybe Sony should just kill the UMD altogether and sell games exclusively on the Internet? Do something crazy.
Be bold with the PSP, Sony.
I just got another PSP for Christmas, after taking a break from the platform for a few years. The only reason I wanted one was to play GoW, and maybe Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, if I can find it.
I like the system, but when you walk into any store, you have to worry about how long games are going to be made for it. My local Best Buy, for example, has drastically cut the number of games they stock.
When you look through lists of future releases, it’s looking pretty thin. If Sony hadn’t just released a new PSP, I’d think they were already jumping ship on the entire platform.
I love my PSP, but only use it as a gaming device. I buy probably a game every other month, and there are some great ones out there. But they’re starting to dwindle.
I haven’t read the piece yet, but I agree the emphasis has to be more on the games and less on the extra media stuff. I’ll never use my PSP to access the internet after doing it once, and I don’t use it for music or movies either. When I’m traveling I don’t mind carrying my iPod too, its really not that big a deal. But I love sitting wherever I want at home and picking up the my PSP for a few minutes.
God of War was great, as was Ratchet & Clank, Secret Agent Clank, Wipeout, etc. Something I’ve always missed with the PSP is Mario Kart – its been almost enough to get me to pick up a DS. Sony should design some fun games like that, do something innovative. They created a great platform…they just need to innovate with some new games.
…and its about time they added some serious internal storage. That’s my one hang up about the system, and its inexcusable for a system so powerful to require memory cards.
Yeah, that was one of the points Edge made, that it’s time to ditch godawful UMD and add some sort internal storage. It would allow Sony to drastically reduce the size of the PSP while simultaneously cutting costs.
I don’t hate UMD, and I actually prefer having the option to have my games on a physical media rather than all stored on a hard disk. But it needs at least 16 GB so I can store *some* games on it, along with some movies if I want to. Keep the expandable memory, that’s fine, but it needs its own as well.
As far as the size goes, I don’t know if I would want it to get any smaller. The screen size is perfect, and the buttons (which are all necessary) are already too close to the screen and I regularly leave smudge marks from my thumb.
Here’s something random – I came into possession of an S10 Ideapad. I downloaded an SNES emulator and some ROMs, and basically turned it into an SNES with Firefox. I’ve been using that to play Zombies Ate My Neighbors, and thinking about how great it would be to have that on my PSP.
Sony, how about making some of those old third party games available for the PSP? Zombies used to be on SNES and Sega – why not PlayStation? I would happily pay a couple bucks to have some of those old games STORED on my system – but I’m not buying any more UMDs for games that take up 10 MB of space.
Not to mention that UMD reads so slow.
Dual analog thumbsticks that are positioned higher on the device. That’s all I’ve ever wanted on a new PSP. I haven’t touched my PSP in maybe 8 months, mostly because it’s physically painful for me to play it.
My iPod Touch is a better gaming platform than the PSP is right now.
The fact that the Touch/iPhone get more games doesn’t make it a better gaming platform than the PSP, or any other dedicated gaming system. The fact is, most of what’s released for the i-products is complete crap.
Quantity does not make a good gaming platform.
Well everyone, I don’t think physical media is going to go away just quite yet. But for all the people that want downloadable content, have you ever been on PSN?! There’s tons of things to download for your PSP there.
I think the UMD movie thing is stupid, but what they really need to focus on at this point of the game is better, higher quality, more advertised games. 95% of their games are pretty stupid, the PSPS
What the hell? Can someone delete that? I don’t even know why it posted.
Well everyone, I don’t think physical media is going to go away just quite yet. But for all the people that want downloadable content, have you ever been on PSN?! There’s tons of things to download for your PSP there.
I think the UMD movie thing is stupid, but what they really need to focus on at this point of the game is better, higher quality, more advertised games. 95% of their games are pretty stupid, the PSP really only has about 4 or 5 good games. Lets face it, it’s to late at this point of the game to add internal storage. I couldn’t agree more though that they should of done that in the beginning.
I like to compare the PSP to the Dreamcast, I really think it all comes down to how horrible they advertised the video games and system it’s self. You rarely see the Ads for the PSP and almost never see ads for video games. That was the problem for the Dreamcast, it was a fantastic machine, absolutely amazing, ahead of it’s time, just horrible advertisement.