Joel at BBG writes a stirring piece on the PSP and its promise. I remember Joel IMing me back in 2005 while he was standing in the hot sun in line at E3 to see Sony’s vaunted handheld – “Sony gave me cancer” – and how excited we all were when we first saw this bugger. Now, however, my PSP is basically a retro-gaming box with a wide range of potential piracy options and, most recently, I’ve played the DS more than Sony’s lumpen handheld.
He goes into the failures of the PSP – UMD, no keyboard, bad games – yet says that Sony can step it up and make it out the other end without losing face.
This isn’t out of reach for Sony. In fact it’s already in their blood—the company that makes the Vaio P isn’t afraid to try to make products that straddle category boundaries. (Nor are they afraid to charge twice as much as their competitors to do so.) But Sony, like so many other successful organizations, has become victim to their own illusions of their strengths, thinking they could grow only laterally. That may work with televisions and amplifiers, but it’s not going to cut it in the fight to become the one thing people keep in their pocket at all times.
When a PSP game is good, it’s really great (God of War, Metal Gear).
Unfortunately, the most of the games are mediocre. What’s even more sad is what’s on the future releases lists. The only game I see that looks, even mildly, entertaining is Resistance. Other than that, it’s a bunch of nothing.
When you walk into a Best Buy these days, it looks like the PSP’s days are numbered. There’s hardly anything on the shelf, and they still have a pile of the previous generation PSP.
I just hope I find the time to finish up God of War, so I can unload this thing. It’s losing value by the minute. If I can’t get rid of it soon, I may as well just turn it into a doorstop.
What? The PSP has just had its best ever year in terms of hardware sales, and yet you think that is somehow a failure?
It also had some massive hits game wise (GoW to name one, but also many in Japan), and future releases are looking good with Star Ocean, locoRoco2, Prinny, Resistance Retribution, PES, patapon 2, and another Monster Hunter just to name a few.
The PSP has always been for the more serious gamer, and the serious gamer doesn’t want a keyboard(!) on a portable games machine. A second analogue stick perhaps, but not a keyboard!
All you have to do is look at the list of PSP future releases, then you’ll understand why it’s a failure.
In the video game world, you can sell hardware hand over fist, but that’s not where the money is made. The real money is made in the licensing of games, which just happens to be the PSP’s weak point.
I say this as someone whose dumped a fair amount of coin into the PSP bucket. I want it to succeed, but I know a loser when I see one.
I bought a PSP when I laid up in a hospital bed for 2 weeks…and never played it again.
lol, this year there are only about 7-8 hits for PSP.
Birth By Sleep, Agito, Resistance, MHF:U, and a couple of jap games.
unless you know jap, it’s totally useless to buy a psp, all the good games are in japanese. and then it takes half a year to translate into (bad) english, or maybe the translation won’t even take place.
Yeah the Viao P is a solid fornula for success: use the slowest possible Atom CPU, locate the mouse buttons within millimeters of the space bar, price the whole thing twice what it’s worth, and add the cherry on top: Vista! What could possibly go wrong?
“The PSP has just had its best ever year in terms of hardware sales, and yet you think that is somehow a failure?”
The only reason it had a better year is because Sony finally got nervous, and added a bunch of mediocre special offers. Considering how bad the PSP has been trashed, and received a “good year” is really only an acceptable year to any other system.