Sony won’t give up on PSP

[Toxa]

Rejuvenating its handheld remains one of Sony’s key priorities at this year’s E3; New strategies outlined in exclusive interview

The writing’s on the wall for PSP, there’s no doubt about it. The thing is though, the writing has been on the wall for Sony’s handheld for a few years now. And it’s still here. It’s still selling. It’s doing brilliantly in Japan.
And Sony clearly has absolutely no intention of giving up on its plucky little machine.

MCV recently met with SCE UK sales director Mark Howsen and PR boss David Wilson. Perhaps the most surprising outcome of the talks was this – whilst Move is clearly Sony’s main act at this year’s E3, it’s not the only priority.

The platform holder still has big plans for PSP.

It admits, of course, that the PSP is struggling outside of Japan. Sony has never issued UK sales numbers and a look at the official figures reveals why that’s no surprise. However, Sony is keen to point out that its machine isn’t the only handled struggling in the territory.

“I think in handheld over all the industry is at a bit of a tipping point,” Howsen explained. “We’re seeing a trend whereby consumers are relatively accepting of the fact that they have to buy high-price hardware but at the same time they expect to pay very little, or sometimes even nothing at all, for software. That’s a real shift in behaviour.

“Of course there will always be a market for premium, full value product but the balance between that and value content is changing quite rapidly. That’s been fuelled by, I guess, piracy initially but now also the advent of new business models coming into this space and that’s feeding it even faster.”

Though not referred to by name, the influence of iTunes and its aggressive pricing strategy permeated every sentence. Though Apple’s brand remained unspoken, Sony’s reaction to it has been clear. First, the cut-price PSP Essentials range. Then this week brought the news – broken exclusively by MCV – that Sony is to give away ten games to anyone registering their PSPgo after April 1st 2010.

All these moves are designed to steer PSP gently away from the triple-A full-price software model and ever closer toward an Apple style strategy.

“To reinvent the whole PSP model wee need to look at handheld in a very different way, in the context in which consumers are now viewing it,” Howsen added. “We’re trying to reengage consumers with PSP, though that’s not just a challenge for us – it's a challenge for the whole handheld sector. We are at the point of a major shift in the way that consumers are engaging with the current players in that market.”

Questions regarding the PSP 2 – a machine that MCV is absolutely convinced will be revealed this year – were rebutted. But rest assured that every change we’re seeing in Sony’s approach to handheld now is simply laying the foundations for news heading our way later this year

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/39203/Sony...dustry+news%29

[RedZeppelin]

I hope they don't give up on it. But what they should do is open it up more. It's a fantastic piece of hardware but hamstrung by firmware/software restrictions. Why not allow more developers to create apps for it? Why not improve the web browser and media playing?

I love watching movies on mine, but how cool would it be to be able to watch Youtube or Hulu on it? Or listen to Pandora?

[Germtop]

Originally Posted by RedZeppelin

I hope they don't give up on it. But what they should do is open it up more. It's a fantastic piece of hardware but hamstrung by firmware/software restrictions. Why not allow more developers to create apps for it? Why not improve the web browser and media playing?

I love watching movies on mine, but how cool would it be to be able to watch Youtube or Hulu on it? Or listen to Pandora?

That sounds fine and dandy but I think that mindset is detrimental to the PSP. They seem to have focused for some time in making it a kind of Jack-of-all-trades device as if the gaming part wouldn't need any improvements whatsoever.

They need to forget for a while about miscellaneous stuff and really focus on the gaming aspect. Their strategy has been too scattered.

Would it be sweet to have the features you mentioned? Of course. But before that I want to see a robust gaming platform with most of the flaws resolved.

We have a myriad of handheld devices that can play YouTube or Pandora or Hulu, but only one that can play the likes of God of War, Syphon Filter, Monster Hunter, MGS, etc. They need to realize that they really have no competition (besides Nintendo ;-)).

[DonRSD]

if the psp had TWO shoulder buttons and TWO analog stick and could be played/used as a glorified ps3 controller then it would appeal to me more.


as it is now, i use it to store stuff on the memory card for my son to play

cheap software on a portable device = the way to go