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EA Pushes Sony on PSP, Price Cuts Possible
GameDaily reports that EA has been pushing Sony to be more proactive with the PSP. The software giant feels that Sony is 'letting the DS win' by failing to adopt an aggressive strategy for the handheld console. The article mentions a piece run on CNN's Game Over column, where Chris Morris talks about the possibility of a price cut by the end of the year. From the EA article: "'There is a price cut coming in the second half of the year,' said P.J.McNealy of American Technology Research. '[The PSP] has lost momentum. Nintendo has had a great run since it launched the DS Lite and Sony needs to regain some ground.' In the meantime, though, EA has been thoroughly encouraged by the DS and DS Lite and conversely discouraged by the PSP, to the point where the publisher is apparently reconsidering its strategy in the portable market."
The PSP, while expensive, was absolutely an incredible system. Too bad Sony didn't care to use it.
Games? Most games suffer from the "portable" curse of generally being very bad products, but that's the developers' fault. A poor analog "nub" aside, this can partly be blamed on third parties, but Sony certainly didn't take any initiative here.
Video? UMD movies failed, of course. But for our own videos we have to deal with low-resolution files that can't be produced by a standard encoder because it uses non-standard headers, and then there's the weird naming scheme that's required. And there's no purpose behind these aggravations except to prevent consumers from using the system's abilities to its fullest extent. Aggravating your customers and preventing them from using your product doesn't win you any fans.
Music? It sounds very nice, but the interface is no better than the cheapest of MP3 players. It doesn't manage your music, but it doesn't allow directories deeper than one level, so you can't organize your music, either. A decent music player interface is *not hard*. They just didn't care.
Network features? How long did it take for a decent web browser? RSS feeds? RSS feeds *that allow you to save anything*? Having these is GREAT, but the fact that it took so long to get them shows us the issues Sony has. But how many games actually have decent online play? 90% of games that only support local play should be able to be played online.
Sony made some great hardware crippled by idiotic management. I feel insulted as a customer. Some where in Sony, there is some one with a lot of vision whose great leaps are constantly struck down by some moron. Find the moron and fire him, and Sony will be OK.
The same thing happened with the PS2. Great hardware crippled by a few moronic decisions (the almost-but-not-quite enough video memory and the absolute failure to make use of network or multimedia features spring to mind). Why should I believe the PS3 will be any different?
Also you state the PSP has more games, but that doesn't paint the whole picture. The PSP currently has only 3 titles that sold over 1 million copies worldwide and the DS has 13. One of which (English Training) isn't even a game, so it wouldn't show up on Metacritic.
The PSP had UMD movies that were lower resolution copies of Movies that were not playable on anything else; cost more then a DVD of the same movie, and usually had fewer extras due to lower disk capacity. The DS has a wider variety of games, and other Software that appeal to broader demographics.