Playstation Portable owners will not be able to transfer the disc-based UMD games they own to a PSPgo when the sleek new digital-only system launches next week, Sony officials told Kotaku today.

"We were evaluating a UMD conversion program, but due to legal and technical reasons we will not be offering the program at this time," a Sony Computer Entertainment of America spokesman told Kotaku.

The $250 PSPgo has no UMD drive, instead relying fully on an Internet connection to purchase, download and install games onto the system's harddrive or removable memory.

At this year's E3 Expo in Los Angeles, Sony Computer Entertainment officials said that they hoped to have a plan in place to allow UMD games to be transferred over to the PSPgo by the launch of the system.

"We are looking into programs for owners who have previously purchased UMD titles and want to exchange them for digital versions," Sony Computer Entertainment's Brian Keltner told Kotaku at the time. "It's something we are still hammering out the details. As soon as we have solid plans in place we will make an announcement."

One of the rumored plans involved Sony installing kiosks in retail stores which would allow gamers to turn their UMD games into digital ones. Recently a Dutch and Australian retailer said they would not be carrying the PSPgo.

While the ability to transfer already owned copies of UMD games to the PSPgo could likely have a large impact on whether current Playstation Portable owners would buy the system, it's unlikely it would impact gamers new to Sony's portable offerings.

During the Tokyo Game Show Sony unveiled new peripherals for the PSPgo, dropped the price of the Playstation Portable in Japan and announced the launch of a program that would free games to people in Europe who upgrade from the PSP to the PSPgo.

meh.. lots of bad psp go! news these days.

It takes a special type of company to completely kill off all hype of their product BEFORE THE PRODUCT IS EVEN RELEASED!!!

This is the reason why the ds is killing the psp , far too many useless revisions in a short amount of time.

I want to play my valkyrie profile and MGS games my last PSP broke, I'm not sure if I can get this if not UMD maybe I'll be getting a PSP 3000.
I'd like to use this as a cellphone, I'm just waiting to know if it will be used as a cellphone to buy it.

well if the sort out that legal stuff il get the go hopefully it will be down in price by then

Hahahahahahahahahaha I love Sony.

They are evaluating how much to charge you for the games you already bought, which is probably the same price as people who don't have the game.

to be fair sony should have thought of this before considering the GO

No converter, no buy.

reading old UMDs means they can't put in a new protection protocol... you could then bypass the securities of new games by emulating old UMD protocols...

Without this option for gamers, they can even have different versions of the PSN games, one for the GO with higher security and one for the old PSP, should not be hard to do.
it makes sense that they would want to put some new limitations to the capacity of hackers to break the GO

They really should just as well have released a new console than just a one legged PSP...