Why the Sony PSP Had To "Go"

[wraggster]

We recently discussed the release of the PSP Go, which drew criticism for many design choices that were of dubious value to consumers. Now, Phaethon360 sends in a story about why Sony felt the need to improve upon the old PSP. "As a format, the UMD was holding the entire platform back. Few people (if anyone) bought into the UMD movie hype Sony attempted to thrust back in 2005. Very soon after that, people realized they could rip their DVDs to a memory stick with the same quality. It's ironic how, as the price of Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo dropped and size increased, PSP UMD sales decreased along with it. It doesn't take too many Howard Stringers to figure out what the problem was." Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time. They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.

http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/0624228/Why-the-Sony-PSP-Had-To-Go

[Justise]

I agree that the UMD was a Major disaster. I could believe my eyes when they said that they were planning to release movies on the UMD. The UMD was responsible for the PSPs large size, noises and big loading times.

It was clear that the UMD had to go, and I was expecting that in the PSP2 the games would be released on ether a sound and loading free card like nintendo, or in the form of Digital downloads.

However I wasn't expecting that they will actually go all the way to abandon the UMD before a PSP2 is even released...

[symbal]

Yeah but they haven't abandoned umd though, i mean they still releasing the Psp 4000, so think of the Psp go as a test run to get people used to the idea of digital downloads before they go all the way with Psp2.