Al Warmington wonders why it already seems like digital downloads have been left too late?
Sliding screens and internal memory aside, the most fundamental change in the new PSP Go is the lack of UMD drive. Until recently, UMD has been the only medium available to full-sized new PSP games.
But what at first glance looks like an abrupt turnaround for the tech giant, is in fact something that Sony has been considering since the birth of the PlayStation Portable, according to Sony’s Naoya Matsui.
In a recent interview (Japanese), the head of SCE's product planning division explained that Sony has been considering a 'network centric' model all along. “We'd planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning,” Matsui said. “But if we'd simply released the hardware, there wouldn't have been much for everyone to enjoy. We needed to prepare the right environment for it first - things like the transferral of content with the PS3 and PSN, and PC software to manage content like music and movies such as 'Media Go'.”
These comments stand at odds with Sony’s sometimes painful love affair with proprietary optical media formats. But putting that aside, the question now on the lips of many critics is why did Sony take so long? Right now, PSP faces some of its toughest challenges yet – it’s already a long way behind the Nintendo DS in the handheld market and the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch are steadily encroaching on handheld gaming turf. The iTunes App store already boasts hundreds of downloadable titles and more major games publishers are getting board every day.
In the harsh clarity of hindsight, it seems that Sony should have pushed for digital content years ago, rather than waiting until now to jump on the bandwagon. Furthermore, in what seems like an attempt to pacify games retailers, the digital versions of games aren’t even particularly advantageous to the average consumer – they are set to cost the same as the UMD versions, despite the lack of packaging, instruction manuals and shipping costs, and they can’t be bought or exchanged second hand.
But then again, when the PSP launched back in 2004 – and even by the time it reached these shores, almost a year later – it was a very different market out there, and the handheld console was a very different beast. Back then, even having a very rudimentary browser on board was a bit of novelty, not something you’d expect as standard.
This was also months before the Xbox 360 hit the gaming scene and made game downloads a permanent fixture in the console market. Yet at the same time it was pioneering in-game DLC in games like Wipeout Pure.
So perhaps Sony’s mistake was in spending too much time preparing “the right environment”. Sony puts a lot of focus on its PS3-PSP interconnectivity, yet the number of people who own both systems must be relatively low. Even so it took until October 2008 for the PSP’s dedicated PlayStation Store to come to light and that’s given Apple’s rival devices a chance to slip in and grab a sizeable portion of the growing download market.
Yet Sony is not out of the game either.PSP Go is not due out until October 2nd, so customers have yet to express their opinion of Sony’s enhanced download service with their wallets. In the long run too, the huge Sony corporation has an awful lot of content and services that could be put to use on using that ‘network-centric’ model. Here’s hoping this could be the start of a new era for the PSP system.
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