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Sony Continues To Lose Ground In Mobile Gaming
donniebaseball23 sends this quote from an opinion piece at Industry Gamers:
"On Monday, news came down the pipeline from SCEE president Andrew House that Sony wants to focus on a younger audience for the PSP with future titles. My immediate reaction was one of shock and confusion. After all, in an interview with IndustryGamers at E3, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime noted that, 'the way I would describe the market for the Nintendo 3DS would be the launch market that we had with the Nintendo DS plus the launch market that maybe PSP had.' When your primary competitor is looking to the exact market that you've catered to, why would you abandon that market? There was a time when Sony Computer Entertainment was a trailblazer, bringing things to the industry ahead of everyone else. Nowadays, however, it seems that Sony is content to merely fall in step behind everyone else and simply try hard to not fall too far behind."
No, the big problem is pretty much forcing people to use custom firmware because it offers so many more features, not realizing why and just releasing updates to counter CFW and not add those features.
First - the UMD sucked. It's a great way to hold 2GB of data back in the day, but these days, solid state storage means 2GB of storage is cheap (and most games were under 2GB). CFW fixed this by having games load off much faster memory sticks (which started getting cheap). Hell, there was a funny video of a game taking 7 minutes to go from loading to actually in the game.
Second - the video restrictions were lame - you couldn't get full screen video at 30fps off memory stick - only UMD. CFW fixed this as well.
Microsoft realized games loaded faster off the hard disk than DVD on their Xbox and let people copy games from DVD to hard drive (it also was a great way to ensure your used game purchase was readable). They DRM protected the games by requiring the disc (holding the decryption key) be in the drive before launching the game.
Sony could've supported this in a similar way - dump a UMD to memory stick and either grab the key from the UMD, or use a machine-specific key. Games load faster, battery lasts longer, etc. CFW supported this why didn't Sony?
Second - well, eventually Sony relented when they realized people wouldn't pay $20 for a DVD and $20 for a UMD copy of the same DVD, but it took long enough.
Finally, the PSP Go - that's a laugh. It may work for a new PSP gamer, but old ones have UMD libraries and no way to play those games on the PSP Go, without purchasing them all over ago. There was a lame exchange program, but that's it - in exchange for a more expensive machine, and losing the ability to buy/sell used games. The PSP Go would've worked better as an iPod Touch competitor that happened to play PSP games, not as a PSP. And a large reason the App Store works is because of the free apps and cheap apps.
Those ads saying "Look what you get for $9.99" make me laugh - and show how out of touch Sony is. Sure you can sell a few games at $9.99, but I'm sure the App Store and the like have titles from big publishers at that price with equivalent quality. Though I think EA went and dropped the price to compete better...