via Gamedaily
In a new interview with IGN, John Koller, senior marketing manager for the PSP, shared his thoughts on the PSP's recent surge in the market and how the platform itself is evolving.
"...we talked [previously] about year three of the PSP really kind of being the year when it was going to come out fighting and I think what we saw was, with the price drop and with the new hardware configuration, the PSP 2000, that we really saw an incredible jump in demand -- so much so that we really had a worldwide demand bump that was very, very significant and allowed us to increase our total shipments worldwide," said Koller.
"So for us, in North America, we saw an 85% jump since the price drop in April of last year and we've really seen a wide variety of casual gamers get into the PSP market. Some of them are driven by the games, but others have been really driven by a lot of the multi-functional features and we've noticed a substantial increase in the amount of consumers using the PSP for music, using it for Internet browsing, using it for video -- which isn't as big a surprise to us, just because the PSP was really made for showing off brilliant graphics on the screen."
Sony has repeatedly talked about 10-year lifecycles for its consoles, but Koller also believes the PSP will stick around for 10 years. The portable may see some more changes along the way, however.
"We've talked about the PSP being a 10 year product, but a 10 year product in the continued... how can I put this... in the continued lifecycle, so we obviously had the 1000 [model], we have the 2000, so the PSP as it was first launched in March 2005 isn't going to the be the PSP that it ends up as in 10 years, but it will still be a very strong portable gaming device that is centered in gaming and has a lot of multi-functional features," he explained. "We look at it just like our console business being a 10 year cycle, but we do see iterations as we go along to really adjust to the market. What we've done is the 2000 series adjusted to the market in terms of making it more portable. What we're seeing now, at least in the near- to mid-term, is going to be firmware updates that add features and other functions that the consumer's asked for."
Later in the interview, Koller also clarified something that a number of us have been wondering about, namely if the upcoming Portable Copy feature (copying a Blu-ray movie to PSP) can be applied to any existing Blu-ray movie. Unfortunately it can't.
"It has to be already included. We do think that most Blu-ray movies from Sony Pictures will include it starting this summer. There are some DVD movies that'll include it as well," he said. "The first one was the latest Resident Evil, and that launched, I believe, in November, so there'll be a few DVD movies as well that will be included in this program. It won't just be Blu-ray."
