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Is There Anything Wrong With The PSP?
An anonymous reader writes "In the latest 'Analyze This' series of exclusive Gamasutra features, analysts from Screen Digest, ABI Research and DFC Intelligence look at what Sony and developers can do to improve the PSP platform, to generate more excitement for it among developers, gamers and the industry overall — or if they even need to. 'My feelings on the PSP are mixed: It has shown there is demand for a more high-end portable system. The portable market has room for two competing portable systems. We forecast that over the next five years dedicated portable systems will sell just as many units as the new console systems. However, the PSP could really use a new model. This has been the secret to Nintendo's success.'"
i suspect the main thing the psp needs are games and not UMD movies. All th PSP has are broken ports and the occasional remix. There is a reason why they have a ps1 emulator on it and most people use it for homebrew.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Stop spending time, effort and money deliberately making it hard for people to develop their own software. Sony should be encouraging that, not making it harder. (They could reinstate lik-sang and pay them damages, too).
Sony needs to stop allowing their movie / music division to dictate to their consumer electronics division. They added UMD movies to the PSP that nobody wants. They added Blu-Ray to PS/3 and slipped their schedule out a year and added hundreds of dollars to the consoles cost. They keep putting all sorts of unwanted DRM into everything. Sell it off and get back to making well-designed consumer electronics.
[Insert pithy quote here]
It only costs 30% more than the Nintendo DS Lite right now for more functionality out of the box.
Its load times are obnoxious for a portable.
Certain games are bad, yes, but not all. I own 14 PSP games and none of them have load times that have made me annoyed or anything like that.
It's too big to stick in your pocket.
Funny, I just put mine in my pocket with no problem and I have the Mad Catz clamshell on it which increases the size quite a bit.
The control scheme is awkward.
The joystick is weird, but personally I got used to it fairly easily. Other than that, everything is fine control-wise for me. The issue may actually be that the games you've played are ports of PS(X/2) games and therefore you're used to the PS2 controller layout.
The games suck.
Purely personal preference. I mean, like I stated above, I have 14 games and I like them all. I only own about 6 DS games in comparison.
The battery life sucks.
You know, my friend complained about his PSP's battery life, but mine's been fairly good for as long as I've owned it. It's been about as good as my NDS when both are at a full charge. I can tell you that if you leave the wireless networking on, it won't last as long. It also eats up power while sitting there dormant.
Nobody wants to buy movies again on UMD.
Agreed with that. UMD is useless, because it costs as much as a DVD and unlike a DVD, you have limited use! If the PSP had a video output feature, it may have been better, but there isn't one.
The lack of a touchscreen didn't do in the PSP. The GBA was a very capable portable without one, and before the DS (and up to a year afterward), no one would have thought it a viable or vital component. People understand it now, but when the PSP was in development, there was no way they could have foreseen how things would play out (especially at risk-averse Sony).
No, the biggest problem with the PSP is that it is a powerful system and that it was marketed that way.
Sony kept referring to it as portable PS2, with all the power of a home console in your hand, and what happens? A bunch of developers rush to port home console games over to the system without thinking about the particular needs of handheld gaming. Long load times, oversized levels, infrequent save points -- these are all things that longtime GBA devs knew to avoid, but were completely overlooked by the studios that were lured in by the easy power of the PSP.
So, a lot of the poor ports or poorly-thought out originals make their way over to the system, and people get the idea that there aren't any quality games for it. The few that are out there get drowned out by all the garbage, and people are hesitant to spend $40 to take a risk on new games.
Add in the "homebrew" enthusiasts who were also lured in by the promise of raw power, and it's a recipe for trouble, if not outright disaster.