Predictions Of Further PSP Release Delay Floated

Thanks to CNN Money for its article discussing the possible further delay of Sony's PSP handheld. According to the piece: "Activision CEO Bobby Kotick told investors yesterday that his company does not expect the PSP to launch in North America until the second quarter [of 2005]." It's explained: "The PSP was originally scheduled to go on sale worldwide this holiday season. In February, Sony pushed back the U.S. launch of the system to the first quarter of 2005, but said it still planned to launch on schedule in Japan." The article also comments on possible PSP battery life issues, suggesting "...those putting games together for the system say Sony has urged them to avoid streaming game levels from the Universal Media Disk, to lengthen the system's battery life."

Comments

Building hype...

[dmayle]

Oh, come on... Everyone knows that they should just release around 1000 of them this holiday season, with plenty of copies of all the shipping titles, so that, when Christmas comes around, there will be an artificial scarcity, and people will think they are more popular than they are. This will be be a feedback cycle that will keep pushing hardware sales, and allow them to sneak into the market. Hey, it worked with the PS2, didn't it?

Re:Building hype...

[thryllkill]

I agree with everything in your post except of course the part about the PS2 sneaking into the market. Prior to the current generation of consoles there was really only two players, Sony and Nintendo (I know I know, Sega was there too, but come on, were they ever really a threat to either Sony or Nintendo?). With the N64 and its down right dismal sales record Sony stood tall as the market leader. While the scarcity of hardware certainly did drum up not only press, but consumer ferver as well, the PS2 hardly snuck Sony into the market.

Re:Building hype...

[hal2814]

And if anybody gets on of these scarce PSPs, please send me your box so I can sell it on Ebay for $400.

Re:Skipping?

[iocat]

Anyway, since most games probably won't be spooling off the UMD (RTA), but instead loading in chunks, it shouldn't be a major issue anyway.

How to suck eggs

[Kris_J]

"...those putting games together for the system say Sony has urged them to avoid streaming game levels from the Universal Media Disk, to lengthen the system's battery life."

Any half decent developer will have worked this out without needing any prompting by Sony. In fact, I doubt the quote is true. Instead, I'm sure that developers are busily determining how best to trade off the disc against RAM against CPU time. If CPU time is "cheaper" than reading from disc, then files will be compressed on the disc and decompressed into RAM -- unless RAM is so tight that data has to remain compressed in RAM until needed (or the SPU is so slow that decompressing data slows disc access, since power drain is related much more to the disc spinning than data actually being read). But if running the CPU at 100% impacts battery life (or the overhead affects game performance) too much, developers will still stream data off the disc. This is where real programmers shine and development houses that rely on high level development tools suffer.

Of course, if they'd gone with cartridges, the power draw and loading times would be significantly less.

Re:How to suck eggs

[Kris_J]

but the games would be significantly smaller,

I dispute that. FMV sequences are not only stupid, but increasingly pointless given the quality of realtime rendered animation. Given the relatively small amount of RAM available, I would be seriously suprised if a game with no heavy use of FMV and speech had trouble fitting on a cartridge given that re-writable flash RAM in a profile as cramped as SD is roughly A$1 a MB.

This might have been an issue when the N64 came out, it isn't anymore.

Re:How to suck eggs

[Kris_J]

We should also remember that no-one cares about battery life.

Actually, the /. article itself indicates that Sony cares about battery life. Also, the history of the Gameboy vs the Lynx vs the GameGear shows that battery life is a make or break issue.

It's just DVD technology,

I thought it was this new blue laser technology or something. Even if it is DVD, 8cm CDs went away because of the overhead required to keep two sizes going in the factories, so the cost is obviously more significant than you make out.

But before we say anything else, we should remember that Japan owes its economy to optical disks,

Which is why the Nintendo used carts for three generations of consoles (and all their portables), the PC Engine used cards and the Neo Geo was effectively a daughterboard in a plasic case. And why Sega Japan's demands to fast-track the Saturn as the expence of the 32X and the planned Jupiter were so successful.

Sure 700MB was a nice lot of room, but everyone seems to forget the voices complaining about those loading times. I distinctly recall someone describing the PSX as "The platform for RPGs with massive Loading... times." I've got a pinball game for my PSX where the urge to play it has gone away by the time a table has loaded.

Everything is a compromise. If you want to go disc, you're sacrificing battery life and loading speed. If you want to go cart you're sacrificing a cheap production process and capacity. If you forget this you risk making a significant mis-step in the marketplace.

Re:Interesting

[Naffer]

2 to 10 hours doesn't average out to 6 hours. It means that if you push it hard you'll get two hours, and if you hardly use it at all you'll get 10. If you're playing a video game that is powering the screen, UMD disk, audio, and processors, you can bet you won't get 6 but something closer to 4.

Re:Rich man's toy...

[mausmalone]

Just 2 things:

• (a) I really didn't even expect the PSP as early as Q1 2005, so it kind of surpises me that it's being pushed back to then.
• (b) since when did Sony ever release anything on time. It's a marketing tactic they use to prevent you from buying something else that's already out. Like, if you were gonna buy a GBA SP right now, you might say "well, I'll hold off and see what the PSP is like." As long as the launch is always right around the corner, they can squeeze a few more sales out.

That being said, GT4 portable is a very cool idea.