Even With A Hardware Update, Is The PSP On Life Support?

[wraggster]

Hold onto your limited edition Stealth UMD. It’s been a cruel summer for PlayStation Portable fans and it’s not going get any better between now and ‘09. Considering you can’t can’t walk three feet in Wal-Mart or two steps past a glittery-nailed ‘tween (txt me, Kelli!) without stumbling across one of Nintendo’s 70 million-unit moving DS, we recently noticed the more technologically talented of the two handhelds has had a less than stellar year when it comes to software.

Surefire blockbusters aside – and really, who can resist killer apps like Petz Saddle Club and the ever-popular My Spanish Coach– times are definitely tough for the little high-tech paperweight that could. Throw out the titles with “TBA” for a date and the schlock with a concrete delivery day and the current release projections show less than 30 unique PSP titles due before 2009, or fewer titles than the DS will see in the month of September alone. The release schedule might change but the scientific fact remains that saying My Little Pony Pinkie Pie’s Party five times will result in you actually growing a vagina.

For the record, the recently-announced PSP-3000 isn’t much consolation. What were looking for here is a little love– i.e. a decent frappin’ game– not a more glare-resistant screen, sharper colors and built-in microphone for whispering sweet nothings to your secretly closeted ex-roommate while playing hide-the-pigskin in Madden.

Which begs the question: What the hell happened to the darling of homebrew software enthusiasts and DVD junkies anyhow? Why, it seems like just two halcyon years ago we all thought Shigeru Miyamoto would soon be busking for yen in an Osaka railway station while Sir Howard Stringer snorted Colombian pure off a Brazilian supermodel’s taut ass to celebrate 15 digit PSP-fueled profits. Bummer. Determined to find out, we asked a few of the industry’s best and brightest.

“Simple… Sony over-engineered the PSP, and as a result, it’s become a no-man’s land,” explains Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter, in typically understated fashion. “The system’s caught in this grey area: You can’t make a title of PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 quality for it, but you can sell way more copies of simpler, less far-reaching games on the DS instead. It’s more expensive to develop for the system too: As a developer, you can make a $50,000 title for the iPhone, or pay $1 million for a PSP outing – which do you think goes over better?”

http://www.dasgamer.com/even-with-a-hardware-update-is-the-psp-on-life-support/

[Justise]

Sony made some serious mistakes with PSP!
From the very beginning they didn't think right of how a hand held console should be!

1. There ARE loading times! Big ones! It's unacceptable for something you are holding in your hands! Not to mention the Lag!
2. It makes a lot of noises when reading the disc. Especially in loading times. Also unacceptable for something you are holding 20cm from your head.
3. The worst analog stick i ever seen. it is almost unplayable. And the fact that it is only one totally kills the possibility of a good FPS or a third person game with proper camera movement.
4. Sony insist on supporting the long dead UMD movies instead of making the console support more video formats. For gods sake, this is a multimedia device with one of the best portable screens ever appeared, Yet I need half an hour to upload 20 min of video.
5. I'd rather not mention the tons of Ports... that most of the time were way worse than the original. (see Ape Escape, Valkyrie Profile)

Proof that Sonys are Idiots!...
After Nintendos move to release a lighter DS, Sony tryed to copy them, Focusing on the development of a lighter, hardly smaller, PSP. The question is... Did PSP really needed that much to be lighter?
Nintendo rushed on making DS lite because of it's controls. Since many DS games were being played with couch screen, the player had to hold the DS in one hand right from the corner were the D-pad is. That was very tiring. Taking into account the large female community of DS, it was clear a lighter console had to be made...
Now, how useful is a lighter PSP?....
It is for the better of course, but was it necessary?

[mike_jmg]

I just came up with a theory to blame it all on Nintendo LOL (sounds crazy and full of fanboyism but it's nothing like that)

In the begining there was us, gamers, people who have been from console to console wanting always more complex, larger and greater games. (for example myself, started with nes, snes then N64 and so on)
And there were the non-gamers, just regular people who didn't really liked all this technollogical stuff even thought of it as dumb.

And for a time it was good

Then Nintendo started searching for new horizons in their quest for profit.
First they made their lunchbox, sorry, gamecube, with a controller intended to be used for a 3 year old, and with games that will suit that kind of market (not all of them of course, there are some great exceptions, and no offense to gamecube enthusiasts)

At this point I broke up with Nintendo and went to Sony to see if they could help me in my search of more mature and complex games, my prayers got answered with a ps2 and a bunch of killer tittles that are great and people keep playing up to this days

Then again nintendo in their quest for profit, targeted all of the non-gamers. A fresh naive market that they wouldn't need to impress with graphics or complex stories, simply a control that either a 70 year old or a 3 year old could use.

So the DS and the Wii where born (DS fanboys don't blame it on me but a friend's 52 y/o mother is not a gamer)

Here is where the problem starts, non-gamer market is way greater than the gamer market and they would buy any piece of crap developers can think off just to kill some time.

Here why development costs a lot less on those, and there is a ton of games that everyone buys but it's just quantity over quality, also the right way to get profit with little effort wich is any company's dream.

I just live on the hope that sometime in the future this damn new market will demand good games, just like in the good old days or that at some point they'll get bored and no one would buy this consoles.

So you see, all of this is nintendo's fault

(Even after all of this, I'm still buying a Wii just to play Super Smash Bros Brawl, second hand of course, maybe it was from some granny that got bored muhuhhahahahhahahha!)

Nintendo, I'll see your doom for this

[repuken2]

Psp begins to follow dreamcast path: a great console, ahead of it's time, with great potential that never was exploited at it's max. It has many good games but way more could have been created. It also has a ton of homebrew apps, emulators, etc. but i allways feel that i could have done better. Remember 2006, there were emus and also great commercial games coming out, everyday.

I think a better MAME could have been ported with a couple more of games, a CPS3 emu might be possible aswell as a sega 32x, sharp X68000 and even Marty Fm-Towns. Now why the didn't release PS2 ports like KofXI , NeoGeo Battle Coliseum, Marvel vs Capcom 2 and some other that could have performed great in the little thing.

It's still alive but i hoped it would have done better.

[Veskgar]

Its already been explained best by someone at Sony. 12-18 months is a typical development cycle for a decent game. 12-18 months ago, the PSP was not selling nearly as good as it has been since the Slim was introduced.

I'm sure 6 months or so ago developers started to realize that the PSP was indeed going to be a major contender for handheld gamers and would be in it for the long-haul.

This is why so many amazing games are headed the PSP's way in 2009.

Not fair to us die-hard PSP owners who have been with it since day 1 but better late than never. I don't think the PSP is headed the way of the Dreamcast. Not at all.

I will say that I didn't realize it was so expensive to develop for the PSP. SONY should really tackle that in some way.

Finally, because SONY wants a 10 year life-span for the PSP, they will weather the storm on some slow periods knowing that things will likely pick up in months to come.

I'd almost prefer that approach than the constant release of DS titles, most of which end up being shovelware junk novelty games that only suckers would waste their money on.

[silverstein101]

veskgar:

you made me happy :)

but yeah, what you said makes alot of sense, i have faith in the psp

[jamotto]

So the industry’s best and brightest is Michael Pachter? Oh yea, he is credible. The rest of the article is equally BS.

[JLF65]

I will say that I didn't realize it was so expensive to develop for the PSP. SONY should really tackle that in some way.


It's not anymore expensive to develop for the PSP than any other console. The example in the article was crap - it's $50K to make a piece of crap program for the iPhone, and $1M to make GOW on the PSP. You can't compare the two directly like that.

Games on the PSP tend to be more expensive because the developers throw more money into it hoping that better graphics and sound will make the crap more enticing than something with no graphics or sound, but decent game play. Look at your average DS game - you can hardly tell it from an NES game from the graphics or sound. Devs may not make much money from those games, but they don't cost much either. You can't pour $10M into "Pong" and expect to make money, and that's unfortunately what many PSP devs are doing.