Oh, Sony. You’re so close to being back, and then this happens. As you all know, the PSP Go comes out next week, and judging by all the random unboxings I’ve seen on various message boards—maybe CrunchGear’s PSP Go got lost in the mail? It’s not like we haven’t been writing about the bloody thing for ages now, lol!—it looks like a fine, fine piece of hardware. The kicker, though, is: what happens to all those UMD games we’ve bought over the years? The original plan was to have some sort of trade-in or transfer program, whereby for every UMD you bought, you’d get a code to download the game. (Remember, there’s no UMD slot in the PSP Go, so all games have to be downloaded onto the device’s memory.) Turns out there’s a small glitch.
Sony told Kotaku that it cannot move forward with the trade-in program because of “legal and technical reasons.” So if you buy a PSP Go the day it comes out, then you won’t be able to trade-in, say, Soulcalibur, for a downloadable code or whatever. That’s bad, yes.
Now, that isn’t to say that your UMDs are, henceforth, totally useless, it’s just that Sony couldn’t figure everything out in time for the system’s launch. Maybe in the future everything will be A-OK, but for the time being, yeah, we’re boned.
Sony says that, once all the Is are dotted and Ts crossed, it’ll announce what’s up. I just hope, for Sony’s sake, that it figures something out that’s not altogether a slap in the face to the people who’ve bought UMDs over the years. That’s not a way to keep these people’s business.
I just want to see Sony’s swagger back, for the good of the industry as a whole. Screwing up the PSP Go’s launch is not conducive to swagger-getting.
Yet another reason for me to sit this round of the PSP out. I’m hoping enough other folks hang on to keep it alive for another generation. Now for the beating a dead horse portion of my post, PUT A 2ND ANALOG STICK ON IT NEXT TIME!
How about a first analog stick? I’m sorry, but that current POS does not qualify as a valid analog stick in little world.
my* little world….oopsies
Not a bad point, once I got used to it I didn’t mind the current option that much, but it would be convenient if they could make the analog pop out a little when you slide the screen up.
I have 16 plus UMD games, inc ones from Japan, and have no intention on buying a PSP GO, I like my UMD’s and game cases. I feel more like buying a back up PSP 3000 if anything. Not sure why they are doing this when so many good games are coming out on UMD (like Persona)
This handheld is going to fail epically. It’s more expensive. The games are more expensive. Everything about it is more expensive while at the same time, the handheld is crippled in so many ways
Knowing Sony they’ll end up giving “promo” codes for games, where you get like $5 off the game when you have to buy it again on your stupid UMD-lacking PSP.
No transfer program equals no purchase from me, simple!
Very bad idea on Sony’s part, What were they thinking? Similar to launching a new console at almost a thousand bucks 3 years ago? I forsee the PSP Go dropping to 199.99 after the holidays, around Febuary. After that, maybe 179.99 once they have a way to transfer UMDs to it. For now, they’ll just gather dust on the shelves.