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PSP Delayed Into 2005?
Thanks to the numerous readers who alerted us to the Gamespot article mentioning that the PSP may be delayed until next year. This analysis comes from games industry analysts and is the result of Sony's game title weakness and battery issues. David Jenkins at Gamasutra has additional analysis as well.
What were the launch titles for this handheld supposed to be anyway?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Could the real reason be that they don't want to directly compete with Nintendo's cheaply priced handheld or even that they don't want to draw sales away from their new PS2 model?
Seems like Sony didn't think too far ahead when they planned on releasing this in Q4 2004.
what?
Could this be one of the first nails in the coffin for the PSP, with the DS beating it to market by several months? In the console market, the PS2 was able to gain a huge advantage by being first out. This could be crippling for the PSP if Nintendo plays their cards right.
2005 should be an interesting year for handhelds.
yea.. right.. nintendo would destroy this thing... more features, better games, and longer battery life. PSP is dead before it even came out.. it would be neat to try but i wouldn't buy one.. especially for the rumored $350.. i'd buy a ps3 instead
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
i dont think any sega handhelds were better than gameboy. I fell for the color screen.. game gear sucked batteries so quickly, you could hardly play anything. In my book, good battery life is a requirement for technical superiority.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
If they release it now... 5 titles, 90 minute battery life... Sony won't get a 2nd chance. Jay Leno will be making fun of it on his show.
Look at the n-gage. The first one sucked the weenie. The 2nd one is better, but its too late. Perception is set.
Releasing something that sucks? MS has got that angle convered. Everybody else has to make sure its correct.
If they were to rush out a product simply to come to market at the same time as the DS, you all would accuse them of underhanded tactics to flood the market with an unfinished product.
And if you RTFA you will see: "the securities firm expects the handheld 'to launch later than the current March 2005 expectation". It was already going to be a 2005 launch, now it will just be a Christmas season launch. I'd rather have a good system a year from now than a poorly designed system right now. Of course, Nintendo chose the other route with the GBA, releasing a barely playable system as soon as they could and then a vastly superior GBA SP a year(ish) later.
Better product = We all win.
Have you read the specs for the DS? It has wifi + chat built in to the system. And the way you're talking, the system for true geeks should be the Zodiac.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
So what your saying here is that instead of the usual Sony releases first, followed by a more powerful Nintendo product (Playstation, N64 and PS2/Gamecube)-- we now have Nintendo releasing hardware first followed by SONY'S more powerful product (DS/PSP).
So, will Nintendo's head start here give them the same benefits that Sony had from their head start? Or are the PSP and DS so different from each other that they aren't competing for the same gaming dollars? Or both?
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
There will never be an end to the handheld war. Sooner or later, someone else will try (I'm betting on Microsoft).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Has there been one single official announcement by Sony regarding any of the problems people are attributing to the PSP?
There have been multiple stories on Slashdot in the past couple of weeks and I'm pretty sure all of them have been based on rumors and hearsay.
And people, you don't have to love one machine and hate the other.
I totally think Sony is playing the PSP for the long term. A lot of people are making a lot of comparisons to all the other failed platforms but what I don't think any of them are realizing is that we are talking about Sony.
Is it not the most unbelievable thing in the world that the Minidisc is still on shelves? How much of a failure was that? Didn't the original players/recorders cost like $500? Is anybody even buying it now? Who knows, but for some reason you can still buy them and they are now down around $100 and have up to 56 hours battery life off a single AA. It's probably still a relative failure, but the fact remains that Sony has managed to keep those things on shelves for what seems like 8 or so years now.
Sony can do the same thing with the PSP if they have to. They will not let it die and disappear like so many Sega, Wonderswan or whatever the chuck handhelds. That thing will stay on shelves as the the Minidisc of handhelds forever if it has to, and that price will creep down and down and down until rather suddenly it's competitive. I'm going to guess it'll do better then the Minidisc because it won't suddenly find itself antiquated by something as simple as interchangable portable MP3 players.
Even more importantly, another aspect of it being Sony is that it has the potential to tap the adult market in the same way the Playstation 1 did. People were too embarrassed to buy nintendo/sega systems as they were basically completely associated with kids, but the Playstation rapidly became associated with more 'mature' content and games and unleashed a whole new wave of consumers. Sony is pushing this aspect even harder by making it an 'entertainment platform' capable of movies/music as opposed to just simply a souped-up gameboy. Quite a few people justified their Playstation 2 purchase because it could also play DVDs in a pinch.
I wouldn't worry so much about the game disks as the moving parts in the drive. I've had a cople laptops die hard on me, and its always the moving parts that get it. A laptop usually gets handled well, too - its own padded case, and owners typically treat them with kid gloves. A portable game device, on the other hand, typically gets treated like dirt. They get dropped, tossed around, shoved into pockets and bookbags along with god knows what else, left in the car on hot summer/cold winter days, and so on. My GBA has survived all that, plus pulling double duty as a bookmark and getting closed in a door. I can easily see a PSP joining so many laptops in the Great LAN in the Sky for nothing else but that drive.
That judging from the readiness of each system at E3, Nintendo did not create the DS in answer to the PSP. If anything Sony caught wind that Nintendo was developing the DS and decided to compete.