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Predictions Of Further PSP Release Delay Floated

Posted by simoniker on from the grapevine-says-yes dept.

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."

5 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Building hype... by dmayle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Building hype... by Mike+Hawk · · Score: 3, Informative

      I found this. The nitty gritty is that PlayStation hit 99 million installed and N64 peaked out at 33 million. Unless you are suggesting that Sony sold about 66 million PlayStation units after the PS2 came out? The trick with actually believing Nintendo's numbers is they always slyly try to state how many systems they have installed and count the wildly successful Game Boy in those numbers. And I'm the bad guy around here because I actually have this information and everyone else thinks I'm a troll because their opinions are based on a version of history that just didn't happen...whatever.

    2. Re:Building hype... by hal2814 · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  2. How to suck eggs by Kris_J · · Score: 4, Insightful
    "...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.

  3. Re:Interesting by Naffer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.