Moving ever closer to a download only, UMD-less world: Sony PSP

[jman8]

The Fury said:

jman8 said:

The Fury said:

For handheld market, Sony should move to downloads for games and movies. It's a sensible move. It then might fill a nice gap between gaming and downloading. But not yet, wait until PSP2 in 2010 or something.

but then they'd be competing with the Nintendo handheld and iPod. Maybe the in the middle option is the best one.

 

Aren't they already? The biggest draws to the PSP are the multimedia capabilities (like an Ipod) and the gaming capabilities (like a DS). What Sony needs to do is get better at both of those things. Right now they're doing that by building up the online infrastructure to support a downloadable gaming, video, and music device. With the PS3, PC, and now direct-to-PSP store, I think they have the infrastructure in place. They just have to expand the offerings on the stores. The next step would be to just go ahead and release a new device to take full advantage of this infrastructure.

It kinda reminds me of the development of Xbox Live. It came along early in the Xbox's life and slowly it was built up through the previous generation. Then the 360 came along and completely capitalized on those years of Live development.

At the moment though, PSP is still seen as a games console as primary use, it's not a handheld movable media hub yet. If they are trying to move into the all medias thing, and not just games then they need to promote it as such. There is a reason iPod cannot be bought in game shops and why PSP isn't seen as a music device, whether they both can do those things or not. Promotion is the key, but while they have little discs that are the first and main way to distribute games, that might not happen.

But then, digital only media will, like the iPod alienate a certain populace who don't have a good net connection or maybe have download limits. Or even just don't want everything in a digital form.

 

 

There are ways around these issues. For example, Sony could send out download stations to a bunch of retailers like Gamestop, Bestbuy, etc. Basically it could be a kiosk with an encrypted Wifi signal. You go up to it, select the game you want, swipe your credit card, and then just download the game via the wireless signal. I'm not up on the latest Wifi technology, but I'm assumbing it wouldn't be hard or all that expensive to equip this kiosk with a download speed greater than 1mb/sec (which I believe is the standard for most home routers?) Even at such a slow speed, the biggest PSP games (1.8gb) would take 30 minutes to download. If you take into consideration that most games are smaller and that they could have faster connections, than 10 minutes per game isn't out of the question. In those ten minutes you could just hang around the store playing demos, watching trailers etc. Of course, there's still going to be a population that doesn't want everything digital, but that population gets smaller and smaller everyday.