The PSP's Birthday Party

Joystiq and EnGadget were there for the PSP Launch party, and have plenty of photos to prove it. Looks like it was a great opportunity to enjoy another uncomfortable marketing event. Hats off to the folks who endured it to bring us back the photos. From the article: "The weather outside is awful, but that didn't stop us, a few hundred Sony fanboys, and lots of B-list celebs (who clearly needed to collect the appearance fee) from hitting Sony's official launch party for the PlayStation Portable this evening."

Comments

::Caution::

[Brainboy]

I hope no one was hurt due to flying game discs.

Durability Concerns

[Da Rabid Duckie]

I've held a PSP, and it's pretty solid for what it's worth, and the design is noteworthy. So of course, the one picture that stood out the most to me in that article was the picture of the PSP that had the broken screen from being dropped. I wonder what it took to do that kind of damage... maybe a stiletto heel from one of the cheap actresses there?

On another note, I have a new favorite quote: (from the article) "If someone told you that the PSP is a portable gaming device, shoot these people. The PSP is not a portable gaming device, it is really a convergent portable entertainment device." -- SCEA president Kaz Hirai

Re:Durability Concerns

[unclethursday]

Never know. It could have been dropped and landed at just the right angle to break the screen is all.

I had dropped my old cell phone tons of times over the course of a few years, and nothing ever happened to the screen. Then one time it fell, and hit at just the right angle to nearly shatter the screen.

It's possible that the PSP was just dropped, and it just happened to land at that angle to break the screen.

Still, it makes me wary for people throwing it in backpacks or pockets full of stuff. No screen cover is just a bad design decision by Sony. And we all know there's no way in hell they'll replace a broken screen for free because it isn't covered under their warranty (hell, dead pixels in Japan, not the fault of the consumer, are not covered by the warranty, it says so in the Japanese manual).

fools

[cgenman]

If someone told you that the PSP is a portable gaming device, shoot these people. The PSP is not a portable gaming device, it is really a convergent portable entertainment device.

Right, because the history of convergent entertainment devices is long and illustrious. They would be fools to not want some of this action.

And going with a brand new disk standard that nobody has and nobody sells as a medium for selling movies? It's a brilliant maneuver from some of the industry's best minds.

I should say that the Sony reps I've worked with about other things have been completely with it and didn't lose sight of reality. So what happened to this guy?

Re:fools

[The-Bus]

My only issue is that this fails to play any of the other open standards for multimedia, like Sony's MiniDisc, or Sony's Betamax, or Sony's SACD, or Sony's...

I should have mine soon

[alatesystems]

I'll have mine in about 5.5 hours. I'm not about lines, but they didn't do a midnight thing anyway here. I pre-reserved at ebgames and I'll pick it up at 9.

I think I'm going to get wipeout pure and ridge racers. I'll probably put an article in my journal later today with my "findings".

Wow... scary

[Anonymous Coward]

The level of bitterness and resentment in some of the comments here (and also in the initial news post) is a bit scary. Anybody would think Sony had been killing babies for fun rather than releasing a serious competitor to Nintendo's long-running monopoly on the handheld market.

Re:Wow... scary

[badasscat]

The level of bitterness and resentment in some of the comments here (and also in the initial news post) is a bit scary. Anybody would think Sony had been killing babies for fun rather than releasing a serious competitor to Nintendo's long-running monopoly on the handheld market.

What monopoly? Nintendo's got the market cornered because they make better products than their competitors. You want a list of all the companies that have tried to de-throne them? Off the top of my head:

Atari
Sega (twice)
SNK
Tiger
NEC
Bandai

Just to name a few. Atari at the time was owned by Warner Communications, and was signigicantly larger than Nintendo. Ditto for NEC, which dwarfs Nintendo even today.

Almost all of these systems were more powerful than the Game Boy, and some of them had extra features that the GB didn't have. Why did they fail?

Poor battery life and price. Sound familiar?

Sony is making the same mistakes everybody else has. There are a few differences in the philosophy of the PSP vs., say, the Atari Lynx, but the basic template is the same - you've got an expensive, battery-hungry, big and powerful system going up against a small, cheap system with long battery life (the GBA SP). Why do you think the PSP is going to be any more "serious" of a competitor than any of these other failures were?

Note that I'm not even counting the DS in the equation. The GBA SP is the real PSP competition. At the SP's price, it's practically an impulse buy, whereas the PSP is a major purchase. People may be more excited over the PSP right now but they will continue to buy the GBA SP just because it's cheap and there are a lot of games available for it. You almost don't even need to think about buying one, especially if you're a parent buying something for your kids (which is a huge market in handhelds, and one the PSP ignores).

If somebody else ever figures out what Nintendo has about the handheld market, then I would expect market forces to determine a new winner. But Nintendo has no monopoly; they simply understand the market better than anybody else.

Re:Wow... scary

[badasscat]

Quick clarification to my post - The Neo Geo Pocket actually failed just due to a lack of marketing clout, not any technical issues with the system itself. Same is basically true of the Wonderswan. I think SNK and Bandai are the only two companies who really "got" the handheld market like Nintendo did, but they did not have the resources to market their products against Nintendo. Atari, NEC and Sega did, though; they just had poor products in comparison to the GB (despite their extra horsepower, which doesn't matter much in handheld gaming).

Re:Wow... scary

[EnglishTim]

I think it's a mistake to assume that the PSP will fail to compete with the gameboy just because nobody else has managed it.

Sony isn't aiming for the same market as the SP, certainly at launch anyway. It's a no-brainer for a parent to buy the cheaper SP for their 10 year old who may play for many hours at a go, but for the twentysomething with more disposable income who wants to play great games on his daily commute, the PSP is much more desirable. I don't think battery life is going to be as important for the modern adult gamer as it was for kids playing on their Lynxes thirteen years ago.

Sony also has an incredibly powerful brand in the Playstation, and that will carry over to the PSP. In many circles, PS2 is practically synonymous with gaming, and now you can get pretty much the same thing in your pocket.

Now, I don't think you'll find the PSP wiping out the SP, but I do think you'll find it being very successful and also expanding the market for handhelds.

So shoot me....

[unclethursday]

It's a goddamn gaming device. I don't care what Kaz "The button isn't supposed to line up over its contact, because we designed it that way" Harai says. It's a gaming device, with some extra functions I'm not interested in.

MP3 playback? I could get an iPod for a little more, and save thousands of dollars in memory sticks to get the capacity I'd want. If I want something to play music on, I'll get something with that purpose designed into it, and not one where I need to buy hundreds of Sony Memory Stick Duos at their outrageous prices to fit all my music on. 40 GB of Memory Stick Duos is over $10K... no thanks, I'll spend $400-$500 on an iPod first.

Movie playback? I don't feel like buying my movies AGAIN on another proprietary format just to be able to watch them on the go. I can get a portable DVD player, and have all my DVD extras (because I'm fairly certain all the bonus features I buy DVDs for won't be on UMDs), and not have to buy my movies all over again.

So, yeah, it's a gaming device, with other things thrown on top to try and justify the price and the hype. It's also how Sony really hopes that they can sell tons and tons of Memory Sticks.

Re:So shoot me....

[unclethursday]

Joy. So if I want 40 GB of them, since these are after market SanDisk ones, not Sony branded ones, it's still $7,192. Those are $89.90 each from there, so I'm sure the Sony branded ones are around $100 or more.

I know you are just correcting my forgetting that normal Meory Stick Duos won't work, though. Gotta be the Pro versions.

I don't own anything that uses Sony Memory Sticks or any version of them... so AFAIAC, the PSP is just the way to try and get their Memory Sticks into people's homes, and in a way that will be potentially bigger than digital cameras and such that use them. After all, I can buy a Kodak, or Olympous, or whatever digital camera and never have to use Memory Sticks. If people want to do stuff with the PSP, though, it's Memory Sticks all the way.

Re:comments

[KDR_11k]

I'd purchase the PSP in that situation. Not that I want one but a GF that wants to leave you for buying a fucking game system deserves to get pissed off.

Great game system but not a good movie player...

[bat2k]

The reason why...

a) Won't play popular movie formats such as quicktime, windows media, divx, etc without transcoding.
b) Need to store movies on a sony memory stick with lots of memory.

Players that support popular movie formats and have built in hard drives exist now. But to become popular, I guess they need to be manufactured by a big brand and be able to run graphic intense games.

Is Sony and RIAA going to get in a pissing battle?

[Mr.Dippy]

DJ Danger Mouse was Djing the event? Last I heard the RIAA was all hot and bothered by his Grey Album. Does this mean that Sony, who is a member of the RIAA, is now going to be on the RIAA's hit list? Obviously, Sony Game Division and Sony Music do not give a flying F about each other.

Where are all the hacks?

[wildzeke]

Where are the PSP emulators? Where are the mod chips? Where are the programs that allow you to burn your own PSP media? This unit has been out for about 12 hours now! Lets get going here!

Are these people nuts?

[JocksRPeople2]

This is not a once in lifetime opportunity here folks! Why in the hell would you want to stand outside for 13+ hours in the freezing cold to get a video game system that you could pick up at your local WalMart in about a week with no problems! Wait until these things come out on Ebay for $50 because of some fatal flaw gamers are bound to find. They don't play any "real" movies at this point, the battery life is average at best and before Christmas Sony will come out with the PSP 2 Special U2 Edition with Kung-Fu grip! Wait and it will become available.

I'm confused...

[bynary]

Why is this being called the PSP's birthday party? My first birthday wasn't when I was born. It happened exactly one year after that. Oh right, I'm using logic on Slashdot...

Re:Just Brought Mine Home

[prockcore]

Metal Gear Acid are lots of fun

I just played Metal Gear Acid on a co-worker's PSP (he went to best buy this morning just to look at the PSP, and ended up buying one. No preorder necessary.. aparently there are tons in stock)

I have to say the game totally sucks. I didn't so much as play the game as hit "O" over a hundred times as it went through a slideshow story.

Sheesh.

[2names]

I don't need an economics degree to be able to read a dictionary entry:

Main Entry: monopoly
Pronunciation: m&-'nä-p&-lE
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -lies
1 : exclusive control of a particular market that is marked by the power to control prices and exclude competition and that esp. is developed willfully rather than as the result of superior products or skill --see also ANTITRUST Sherman Antitrust Act in the IMPORTANT LAWS section
2 : one that has a monopoly

Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Law, © 1996 Merriam-Webster, Inc.

Taken from This previous post.

Nintendo has NEVER been the "sole" player in the handheld market.

You shouldn't be a jackass unless you're 100% sure you're right.

I am 100% certain that you are a moron.

Re:Too expensive??

[UWC]

I bought a DS on launch day. I probably won't get a PSP for a while. But I'm not about to defend the DS for its game library. I know it probably is because developers are having trouble figuring out how to make games fun on the DS, but in the meantime, we're getting stuff that ranges from crap (Ping Pals) to highly polished tech demos (Yoshi's Touch & Go) to one of maybe 3 games worth buying for the DS (Wario Ware Touched). And don't bring out the GBA library stuff; if you have a DS you probably already have an SP. The PSP's launch lineup has really impressed me. Obviously its variety is due primarily to its interface being very similar to a modern console's, but there are apparently a couple of games that really take good advantage of what's there. Lumines apparently has the trance-inducing appeal that Tetris did on the original Game Boy. I've heard equal parts praise and disdain for Metal Gear Acid, but it doesn't try to squeeze MGS gameplay into a slightly simplified control scheme, which I see as admirable and in the meantime becomes an apparently enjoyable turn-based strategy game--with level design and encounters actually integrated into both gameplay and story--for those who enjoy such things. Wipeout Pure and Ridge Racer are apparently very well implemented on the PSP. The only real criticism I've seen is that some concessions had to be made for Darkstalkers, as the analog nub is not suited for fighters.

Anyway, I'm not buying a PSP at the moment, but its game selection right out of the gate (in the US at least) easily matches that of the DS even 4 months after its release.