Sony Europe Boss On PSP

Thanks to GameSpot for posting an article summarizing the recent comments of Sony Europe boss Chris Deering about the newly announced PlayStation Portable (PSP). Speaking at the ELSPA Games Summit in London, Deering gave no official hints regarding hardware pricing for the PSP, but said the UMD format software "could retail for anything up to 60 euros ($71) - the majority of games would sell for between 20 and 30 euros ($24-35)" - but note that normally-priced PS2/Xbox games in Europe cost around 60 euros. Deering also mentioned that movies available for the PSP will have region encoding, much like DVDs currently do. Finally, the original news report at UK publication Indie Magazine quotes the SCEE boss as saying: "I think [PSP] can be in fact synergistic and dynamically collaborative with GameBoy" - quite a different attitude compared to Nokia.

Comments

Not a games machine...

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I see the psp as the next generation of minidisc, a technology that, unfortunately, few people are aware of. I have been a minidisc user for years and I believe that with the netmd sony got it right. Excellent sound quality (compared with mp3s, at least), lightweight, and acceptable drm. The psp will be the minidisc of the video age. It will have music, video and games, all in a convenient package. I don't understand why the editors of /. (simoniker might be the only exception) and most other "online journalists" fail to see both the psp and the psx for what they are: multi-faceted hardware that does well in a variety of tasks. I don't care about the gaming capabilities of the psp myself, but I can't wait to have an acceptably good, truly portable format for movies. And do not doubt that Sony will permit recording of movies on those disks - maybe non-css encoded only (home movies, for example), but it is trivial to de-css a movie and mount the iso as a virtual disk in all modern OSs.

The only thing I think is stupid is the region encoding. That rules out sales of movies at airports for long flights, but I guess that a way will be found to overcome this limitation.

Is there a market?

[sebi]

From the original article:
âoeMaybe it might compete with people on the planes, but in the school yard I donâ(TM)t think people will be able to walk around with the PSP and treat it as roughly as you do with Game Boy. So itâ(TM)s trying for a new part of the market to escape the TV, for the shorter leisure time slots that are seeming to be a factor.â

Is there a portable market outside the one the Game Boy satisfies? Movies on the go might make some sense, but what about games? When you play the GB at home it's because it is the only current system playing classic SNES era games. I suppose the PSP would play Playstation era games. At home you can have that on your normal console and if it's not durable enough to be used on the go then why get it in the first place? Sony haven't got the same awe-inspiring back catalogue that Nintendo has, have they? If that is their idea of a modern Walkman then they are in for a surprise. The Walkman was great, because you could easily convert your music to a transportable version. I don't know that for sure, but I suppose that people bought much more music on record or CD than on tape. Now we are supposed to buy the films a second time? If you could copy the movie from a DVD to this thing that would be a completely different story, but in the current climate it is never going to happen.