The Sony PSP was planned to be released without a UMD disc drive from “the very beginning” according to Naoya Matsui, head of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Product Planning.
“We’d planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning,” Matsui told GameBusiness.jp (translated by Develop). So why didn’t they?
“If we’d simply released the hardware, there wouldn’t have been much to enjoy,” said Matsui. “We needed 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’. We wanted to release it when the delivery of digital content was on par with the delivery of physical media. Thats what we’ve been working on these past two years”
The end result? Sony appear to have made three mistakes. They’ve saddled consumers with a device that crosses two formats (UMD and digital downloads), have waited too long, with the Apple iPhone the digital download device of choice among most consumers now, and have still priced the PSP Go “too much” for most commentators. Will the Sony PSP Go thrive despite its format issues, high price and iPhone rival, though?
Out 2 October | £230 | Sony PSP Go (available at Game.co.uk)
