Meet the PSP 2

[stof]

   Sorry bout the long read!

    When Sony recently stated that they had no plans for a PSP 2, a lot of people were skeptical. After all, the sleek little system was a great piece of tech that had amassed some fairly solid sales. But I think that when you step back and look at how the psp started, where it went and what the future looks like, it becomes pretty clear that a second PSP just isn't in Sony's best interest.

    Lets start with the beginning. A consoles dominated by Sony and handhelds monopolized by Nintendo, a company that painfully fell down in the console arena next to Sony. The Playstation was able to elevate console gaming away from just kids and in to the teen and adult male demographic. It was a huge shift towards the people that could spend their own money, instead of the people asking their parents to spend theirs. 

    But handheld gaming had been left behind and was largely a kids domain. It must have made sense to Sony that they could work the same magic with handhelds. And just look at their shiny piece of tech! With graphical capabilities almost as strong as a PS2, handheld gamers could get the types of games that were oh so huge on consoles. The idea of a fully 3D Grand theft Auto game? That's money in the bank!

    Speaking of money in the bank, what could be more lucrative than using your system to establish a new physical media format? If the PSP could make UMD's popular, Sony would have an entirely new revenue stream of UMD licensing to film companies. And how could the UMD not be successful if the PSP saw PS1/2 like numbers?

    And just imagine how emboldened their predictions must have become when Nintendo revealed their defence. The ugly bulging gray thing with two screens and a microphone (the announced the touch screen later), must have been seen by Sony, and all of us for that matter, as an act of desperation. Sony is coming to Crush Nintendo, same old story.

 

    But things turned out very different. I don't have to tell you just how fantastically the DS did, at first in Japan, and later the world. The DS Lite was a large part of that, some incredibly solid Nintendo releases were part of that, and some new barrier breaking accessible to everyone games was another part of that. But either way, when it looked like Nintendo had nothing left to do but turn off the lights on their way out, they instead completely redefined handheld gaming. Where the PSP hoped to broaden the demographic to older males, the DS reached out to everybody.  And momentum is a very important thing.

    As a device, the PSP was great, it's faults were few. Perhaps the games were a bit slow to come out, and the price was higher than the competition, but the main fault simply seemed to be that the cheaper competitor had a kind of momentum that just couldn't be matched, which contributed to one other very important reason why the PSP is unlikely to continue,

   UMD's. Perhaps the concept of paying close to the full price for a movie that could only be watched on a small screen was altogether doomed to failure, perhaps the PSP just didn't establish a large enough userbase quickly enough for it to succeed, but either way, the dreams of reigning over a major media format were dashed.

    Now some might say that it's irrelevant. That the PSP didn't need UMD's for movies or even gaming, and that recent trends suggest Sony would have much success focusing on digitial distribution... I'll get to that in a sec.

 

    So instead of a dominant position in the industry with the focus of third party devs (and their royalty fees) and a new media format, Sony was left with a mildly successful handheld device that is still selling. So why not build on that userbase? Why not iron out the kinks, accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative and not mess with Mister In-Between?

 

Simple, because of the iphone, the ipod touch, and most future iterations of the ipod.

 

    I'm sure you've all just read the new announcement that the next Metal Gear solid and Silent Hill games will in fact be on the ipod line. And while no one would suggest that a game or twowill have much of an effect on sales, it is far more potent as a symbol of the ipods upcoming prominence in the gaming world. And this one snuck up on is. Normally, a gaming device is announced and launched. But this time, an already successful device is saying "and oh yeah, games!" It's a brilliant strategy for Apple as they have nothing to lose. "What's that? You don't want to buy games for our insanely successful device? ok!, no loss for us", but it's highly unlikely to fail because not only does it have an established userbase, but it has one that's guaranteed to grow exponentially. It won't be that long before most ipods are toucherific, and then there will be 10's if not hundreds of millions of game capable machines out there.

    But it's not being purchased as a game machine you say. Most people are buying a cell phone, not a game device. That's true, but thanks to digitial distribution, it doesn't matter. Anyone can fool around on it and buy a game for a buck, or more if it interests them. With cartridges removed and games always just a click away, nothing is stopping the non gamer from picking up a game in the same way that Nintendogs or braintraining have been successful.

    But the ipod touch line is also a fancy, multipurpose and powerful piece of tech. It offers a lot of attraction to gamers too. A cellphone, music and movie player, internet surfing game device? with a multitouch screen and a powerful processor? One that already has tons of game development for it and doesn't have to worry about establishing a userbase or fighting for retail shelf space?

We may not be able to track it well on VGChartz, But Apple the gaming manufacturer has arrived and they're very successful. 

    The ipod touch is the hard place that Nintendo's dual screened rock has backed Sony up against. And while there is always room to grow and the chance to pull off the impossible (which Nintendo has done twice this gen), the PSP isn't nearly important enough to Sony to take the risks involved in trying another go. And so the PSP torch is passed on to the ipod touch line, which will now compete against Nintendo for the hearts and held hands of gamers.

 

And now I go shower.