Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
The ______ Agenda
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.
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.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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.
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.
My other sig is a Porsche.
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!
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.