The Sony NGP may actually have got itself a real name rather than continuing to bobble along under its generic “Next Generation Portable” moniker.
Leaked images and digging around in domain names by Game Pundit suggest Sony is set to ditch the NGP codename and call its new device, the PS Vita. But frankly, whatever name Sony slaps on its latest portable, it isn’t going to turn around the future of its flagging handheld business…
The original PSP is still flying off the shelves in Japan but it and its pseudo-successor, the PlayStation Go, look like artifacts from a bygone age in a Western market that’s turned to casual gaming and smartphone thrills over full-fat titles squeezed onto smaller screens. The NGP has nothing in its arsenal to turn that trend around.
Spec heads will reel off the seriously impressive features Sony plans to cram into the NGP – two quad-core processors, 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, an OLED touchscreen, dual cameras and six-axis motion-sensing smarts – but all that kit comes at a price. You can expect the NGP to be both hefty and light on battery life.
The biggest problem for Sony though will be persuading a mass market in the West that they need to pick up the NGP and sling it in their bags. With the iPhone 4 and iPod touch fostering an ever more vibrant casual gaming market and Sony itself in on the Android gaming expansion with the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, where does the NGP belong?
Sony’s newly announced plan to port PSP games to the PS3 also muddies the water. On the one hand it offers a potential future where buying a game once brings you cross-platform play as standard. On the other, Sony seems to be degrading the PSP’s sense of identity and trying to squeeze more from the same small clutch of titles.
The Sony NGP will fail because it won’t easily fit into people’s lives. While Sony will tell you that its graphical power will bring PS3 gaming to your pocket, the visuals it will deliver won’t be so mindblowing as to justify the inevitably high hardware price. In a world of convergence, the NGP will be like the PSP before it – a device desperately adding new services to try and play hard in a smartphone dominated world.
While the Nintendo 3DS offers a different (if gimmicky) experience to the Wii sat in your living room, Sony will attempt to sell the NGP as a way of carrying PS3-style gaming wherever you go. But by creating yet another handheld that just feeds off its console sibling, it’s set for ever diminishing returns. It’s competing against app stores with thousands of titles on offer and far lower pricing.
Though gaming on iOS and Android has trended to the bite-sized chunks of games like Angry Birds so far, the onslaught of dual-core and quad-core phones means their graphical grunt is fast approaching the kind of features offered by a standalone gaming device. Forced to choose between a more powerful iPhone 5/ souped-up Android smartphone and the Sony NGP, the PSP successor is just going to look like a compromised solution to most gadget buyers.
Think I’m wrong? Hit the comments and tell the world why the Sony NGP is going to soar to success.
