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Sony Delays PSP To 2005
An anonymous reader writes "CNN Money's Game Over column is reporting that Sony has delayed the launch of the PSP handheld gaming system in the U.S. until it has a 'reasonable amount' of titles to launch with the system. This will push the PSP to 2005 in the States, giving Nintendo free reign in the holiday season - as well as a possible headstart for the Nintendo DS." Some earlier reports had indicated the PSP was due to launch worldwide in November 2004.
one good thing is that the price of the PSP at launch probably goes down as the launch date is delayed. i really hope sony doesn't try to throw the kitchen sink into the PSP - it should be a videogame system and nothing else. there is no need for an N-Gage 2.
smd4985
That being said, I also wouldn't rush to crown Sony just yet. Nintendo has had the handheld market for years, first because of Mario and then because of Pokemon. Now, it has the added bonus of GCN connectivity, an unfortunate necessity in games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles but a pleasant side bonus for other games such as Zelda, Metroid Prime, Splinter Cell, etc...
Remember the Game Gear? Or its innovative yet poorly received cousin the Nomad? Sega had a brand name (Sonic) at the time, something Sony doesn't really have to the same degree. I think the PSP will target your market, people who want high-end portable graphics, but there are lots of kids who like Pokemon and Mario just fine in 2D form.
I have a hunch the PSP will be almost as big a flop as the N-Gage, but that's largely a guess then educated prognosticating.
the PS2 can play every PS1 game ever made.
Bzzzt, wrong.
All generalisations are wrong. You should be more careful about what you post.
Could it be because Sony Computer Entertainment refuses to issue licenses to produce new titles for the PS1 console?
I work in the games industry, Nintendo NEVER claimed that. The Dolphin as it was called at the time (based on the ATI "flipper" chip was always planned for a release around 2001. The system was first shown off at Spaceworld 2000 and before that had a tenative release date of 2001.
According to: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=tech nologyNews&storyID=4438857
"Analysts have seen the PSP as a potential rival to Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s dominant Game Boy handheld player, Nokia's N-Gage wireless gaming device and Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod and iTunes music download service."
Let me seee... the PSP is supposed to compete in:
1. The portable videogame market (mass price point $99, that requires a solid library of games, and a device that can potentially be used by people from all ages without breaking).
2. The not-so-popular market of cell phone + videogame device. (
3. The Portable Music player (that currently is led by a company that not only has improved the online music business (through a store that supposedly can barely break even), but considers these devices as an entry level computer to entice potential costumers into their other product lines.
PEOPLE.... Just looking at how segmented each market is, I think that If Sony can launch this utopic product at a reasonable price point (which seems to be $199) consumers WILL benefit.
HOWEVER, a more realistic approach will be to release a videogame device (as a core), with the potential to have phone modules (don't ask me) or mass storage for MP3's, movies, etc (Memory sticks??, PSP-Disks???).
Otherwise I rather keep my GBA (or GBA2) rather than buy an overpriced device, that is neither a good phone, neither nor a good MP3 player and that because of this, doesn't have a decent games library.
Any ideas?
I get your point about Tetris vs FMV, but there were plenty of versions that didn't focus on Gameplay but managed to be alright fun because the game was so simple. Only one version got everything right: Spectrum Holobyte's Tetris Classic was the only version with controls well-crafted enough to allow an expert Tetris player to play at a speed that was limited by the brain and not the fingers. AND it had scoring to encourage Tetrises.
Is that really a motto? Well, they don't always come. GameSpy had an interesting article, "The Top Ten Handhelds That Never Made It", which both Sony and Nintendo decision-makers may want to look over.
IGN jumped the gun in guessing the release time, Nintendo was just giving tenatives dates and lots of large publications made guesses based on that. If I remember correctly the Nihon Shizbun (sp) a large Japanese newspaper incorrectly stated that Nintendo was planning a late 2000 Japanese release and the story got carried over to other media outsides.
Also, it's worth noting that by late 2000 (as you mentioned in your original post) The Game Cube was scheduled for a 2001 release (as officially announced at SpaceWorld 2000 held in August 2000).
Anyway, I've been working on the media end of the gaming industry for around 5 years, I don't actually work for a publisher or developer though.
The reason the original Game Boy was a hit was not because of Mario, but more because Nintendo bundled a copy of Tetris in with the purchase of a game boy unit. Bam, twenty million Game Boy's sold, almost immediately. The concept of having a portable version of Tetris went over with EVERYBODY, and it was so successful at launch, that in Japan, it actually caused a national crisis and Yen shortage, due to the overwhelming demand.
Well, that's okay for platforms with a headphone jack...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
a little rumour piece I read in game informer magazine (http://www.gameinformer.com).
It mentioned that several developers did not find the system easy to work with and thus there would not be that many titles available for launch.
On an unrelated note, GI is a pretty cool mag. I got it for free with that stupid EB card discount thingie, and it is usually full of good stuff. Its the only "game" magazine that i acutally enjoy reading.
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
Not so fast there, bucko... the Atari 2600 wasn't first to market. It was superceded by another cartridge based system, the Fairchild Channel F, by about a year.
Further still, Sega's Saturn was released months before the Playstation.
If you asked me, its all about a combination of voodoo, karma, and luck when releaseing a new console.
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
IGN and Gamespot make mistakes, or their sources make mistakes. That happens quite a bit, a lot of the publications I've worked for or provided content for have made mistakes, and much to my dismay we've failed to correct it due to embarssment.
Anyway, Nintendo never had an official date for the Dolphin but the plan was always to release it after Sony (basically to have better technology available to them). They didn't announce an official time frame until Spaceworld 2000 which was in August 2000.
Anyway, a lot of other things that got picked up by large organizations with regard to Nintendo for example were that the Game Cube's discs were mini-DVDs (they are actually matsushita optical discs using an optical lens). A number of LEGITIMATE publications continue to call them mini-DVDs due to a few sources misinformation that started it all. A lot of times it can be hard to get urban legends out of the legitimate information system.
Meanwhile the PSP has two processors based on an R4000 core, each at 333MHz. Compare this to a Sony Playstation with a single R3000 at 33.8688 MHz (30 MIPS, bus bandwidth 132 Mb/sec), Sega Saturn with two Hitachi SuperH (SH-2) at 28.6 MHz (each 25 MIPS Plus 22.6MHz Yamaha FH1 24-bit DSP and a couple of video processor chips, and just for giggles, Playstation 2 which is harder to quantify from specifications but its Emotion Engine based around a 2-issue 128 bit MIPS design with 3.2GB/sec bandwidth to main memory, not to mention the couple of vector coprocessors more powerful (though less general-purpose) than the core. Oh yeah, and the same R3000 core (or something programatically the same) as the Playstation is tucked in there too. But, I digress. The PSP is slightly like a baby PS2. It has only one vector unit, but it still has one. The clock rate is basically the same (slightly higher, but not really worth mentioning) as a PS2. It should be a powerhouse of a system. My only regret is that it will probably be locked down pretty tight and I hate to support that kind of thing.
Nonetheless the PSP is a kind of revolution that puts it dramatically beyond today's handhelds, as today's handhelds are ahead of, well, some of the old handhelds. (You would have a hard time convincing me that a GBA is really that much better than a Turbo Express, for example, or even a Lynx, except for form factor.) Of course GBA is not a speed demon, but it wasn't trying to be. However the fact that the GBA SP is so wildly successful in spite of its lack of power does not show that there is not a market for a more expensive device that does it all. After all, Gamecube and Playstation 2 are both still doing quite well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the Sega Master System had 3 or 4 months on the NES
:)
Why do people keep repeating this on Slashdot?
Nintendo took a very famous gamble releasing the NES in North America. At the time, the home console market had been almost dead for a couple of years, and most people were of the opinion that the videogame "fad" was over. When the NES was initially released, everyone thought Nintendo was crazy. Only once the NES had shown that home videogames could once again be profitable did Sega release their system. This was a year or more after the NES was on store shelves, depending on where you were.
As for the Saturn/PS1, you're right - in some areas the Saturn did come out a few months before. Sega dropped the ball (especially after the SegaCD+32X fiasco) and failed to grab any sort of decent market share. Sony had easy pickings, because the only real competition to the PS1 was the SNES, a distinctly non-3D unit, for one thing. A similar thing happened with the Dreamcast, except it was Sony's fanbase and marketing that stopped the Dreamcast from reaching a critical mass.
Lesson: get in the game early, grab a substantial chunk of the market, and you will dominate for years. Failing this, hope like hell that your competitors who beat you are really, really poor at the game. It's worked for Sony twice now
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Different processors, different architecture. They probably will be seeing lots of ports of PS1 and PS2 games, but none of that translation will be mechanical. One contains a 33 MHz R3000A, while the other contains a pair of R4000s at 333 MHz. One has a math co-proc capable of 66 MIPS, the other a whopping 2.6 Gigaflops. The PSP's graphics card is theoretically 100 times as powerful as the Ps1's (not counting screen size differences), and there is 3x the available memory.
Honestly, this thing beats the pants off of the old PS1, and isn't that far behind the PS2. The point, however, is that if someone were to translate an existing game for this new architecture, it would be a fully involved porting process... The kind you would see porting a game from the PS2 to the XBox. The process always takes longer than expected, and requires a lot of work.
Personally, I can't wait for a PSP version of Karaoke Revolution. The people on the Subway will love that one.
The ______ Agenda
The GBA can run Quake I, but at an absolutely terrible framerate. The GBA CPU does not have a divide instruction, or floating point support, which really limits the amount of 3D you can do.
Also, ever play Doom or Duke 3D for GBA ? Doom has such a low framerate its nauseating. Duke 3D is so low resolution you can barely make anything out. Wolf3D is about the limits of the 3D the GBA can do comfortably.
That's definitely something we're going to have to keep in mind. Even if you take a look at the GBA ports of SNES games(say the Mario series), you'll notice that they had to make changes to compensate for the smaller screen size. HUDs are the primary problem, since they need to be text readable, so as a result, games like Super Mario Bros. 3 for the GBA shipped with a HUD that was both relatively larger, and had some things cut.
The net effect of this is that you're losing more screen real estate on top of the already smaller screen, since things drawn under the HUD can't really be played. Precision is also going to be a PITA, since with such little real estate as far as pixels go, you flat out don't have a lot of pixels to draw things with, and that will cost image definition in the end, something you can only cut so far.
This isn't to say that it's impossible to get a 3D game working on such a small space, but I have to agree with the parent here that Sony is going to face some fundamental spatial issues here that might not bode too well for them.
a beta of the snes is out now if you registered as a developer. it has to be signed by tapwave for the rest of us to get a crack at it, so who knows when that will happen.
from what people are saying some games run very well, but no sound yet. this is about a week after work was started on porting the emu from the gp32. hopefully it will get even better very soon, and a have a signed version released.
look in the forums at zodiac gamer for a link to the beta if you can run unsigned apps
oh, and the zodiac kicks ass. great controls and a great pda. just got a 512mb sd card for it too, gotta start re encoding movies to fit on it now.