Sony to Offer New Digital Copies Of Your Old UMD Games

So what will happen to all of your old UMD games if you buy a PSP Go? You'll be able to procure digital copies of those discs, maybe even for free.

I asked Sony's John Koller, Director of Hardware Marketing for Sony, what the company planned to do for their most loyal fanbase—those who'd amassed a large collection of UMDs but who'd also like to play these games on the Go. His response:


We're in the midst of putting together a good will program. We'll be unveiling that soon [because] we actually think there's a significant group that will be upgrading from the 1000...In the past, we've seen a 20-25% trade-up factor, and I assume that's going to be the case here. We've modeled that. So we're looking at a good-will program—a short term good-will program that would continue for years afterward."
Short-term for years afterward? In other words, the program itself will last for years, but these digital game copies will be tied to either when you bought the UMD or the PSP Go—such specifics were not made clear.

Speaking more regarding the technical aspects of the good will program, Koller explained while the distribution model was still in the planning stages, the user's experience would be similar to Portable Copy—a way in which Blu-ray movies can be ripped and converted from the PS3 to the PSP. However, Koller assured me that users would not be ripping their UMDs. Instead, it sounds like Sony will use a PSN-based digital distribution model will "encourage" users to sign up for the service.

But the neatest thing about Koller's Portable Copy comparison? Portable Copy is free. So we're doubting, but uncertain, as to whether or not Sony will be charging for this service. Unfortunately, Koller also slipped in that Sony's "looking at what kind of games will be offered." So Sony's good will program will probably not apply to every title in the PSP's library, but given that there are only a few that matter anyway, maybe this limitation isn't such a big deal.

http://gizmodo.com/5278909/sony-to-o...-old-umd-games

Now I'm confused, why not just release some USB device that can copy your games to your pc, and find a way to encrypt it to only work on your current PSP, that way, people get their games, and sony gets money, everybody wins!

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Originally Posted by darkriku2000

Now I'm confused, why not just release some USB device that can copy your games to your pc, and find a way to encrypt it to only work on your current PSP, that way, people get their games, and sony gets money, everybody wins!

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It's a good idea, but copying games to the PC is something Sony plans to avoid. I envision something to the tone that the download becomes available with a code by providing updates to all umd games released to the PSP, and testing the UMD drive for game specific data so that the games are not ripped ISOs. This is a very difficult subject to talk about (hence the reason he kept his answer very vague) because determining who owns what game is the trick here. How can you help those who are willing to make the change and not screw them over in the process.

If the games had specific (unique to a physical copy) serial number then it would be very easy to do the change because one can only register the copy of the same game once to one's PSN account on the PSP Go per PSN per game (meaning one cannot registed multiple God of War: Chains of Olympus per account). And once your physical games are registered on the PSN account, you can download them for free as many times as you want to a registered PSP Go with a specific record of your PSN account inaccessible to change by your average user on the PSP Go. But if all copies of God of War are exactly alike, then I don't know how Sony would help customers without opening the doors to Piracy unless they don't care about their UMD library becoming the stuff of pirates and let everyone copy everything into the PSP Go, or pull an Apple and screw everyone by releasing a PSP Go and forgetting the customers that jumped the PSP bandwagon back in '05 and making your PSP library useless on the new software.

Either way, I'm not selling my PSP anytime soon.

the whole thing seems like a massive waste of time and effort, they really should have left it alone until a psp2 model was foreseeable

I don't know, the UMD thing is currently the only thing keeping me from getting a psp-go, on account that I'm probably going to beat a ton of my 360 games over the summer, meaning that if I trade those in, along with my psp and games that I don't want, I can make the psp-go a pretty good price