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."

Comments

PSP titles:

[meerling]

I haven't actually had a PSP title for a few years that I actually liked enough to play more than a week. Most didn't even last a day. Going the DS route won't help either. What they really need is good games that people want to play.

Re:PSP titles:

[grumbel]

What they really need is good games that people want to play.

Exactly. The problem with the PSP is that there is almost nothing interesting. There are a ton of solid ports/sequels of PS2 titles, but quality alone doesn't matter when it is just another reincarnation of Tekken, WipeOut, RidgeRager and whatever. I just don't care about playing a downscaled version of games I already played.

The amount of proper new games on the PSP is vanishingly small and that is rather depressing given that the hardware should be perfectly fine for games like Braid, Limbo, Shadow Complex or whatever interesting stuff makes it to XBL/PSN. It is those types of games the PSP could need more of, good solid 2D/2.5D stuff that is easy enough to play on the get go, but complex enough to feel like a proper game and not some casual mini game.

I like the PSP hardware, but without games to play, that is worth nothing and in terms of dust collecting the PSP beats even the Wii by a mile.

Re:Trailblazer?

[gilesjuk]

Have you not seen the PSP Go and what a big mess up it is?

This sums it up, paying more and getting less:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2009/10/psp-go-review-sony-is-charging-you-much-more-for-much-less.ars

Re:PSP Go messed it all up

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah a downloadable as a lot of advantages: it can be revoked at will, when you change console you can be forced to pay for it once more. The publisher can also sell it at the same price as the physical media.

Very convenient indeed.

Sony's position is its own fault

[grapeape]

The PSP's dead man walking state is completely due to Sony's ineptitude. I blame is on corporate ego, after winning two console generations in a row the attitude seemed to be that they could just push their way and gamers would just fall lock step into whatever Sony "blessed" them with, regardless of price, features or support. While pushing all the "features" that the hardcore audience would appreciate, they completely neglected the most important features, games. Gran Turismo portable for instance was demo'ed at the PSP launch announcement and was even featured on the box but didnt ship until last year. The rate of first party titls has been anemic since it launched and the 3rd party support has been shrinking. Piracy can be partially to blame but an equal blame should be laid at Sony's feet for not focusing on the right aspects of the device and supporting it properly. UMD was stillborn, which IMHO was a missed opportunity, I would have gladly paid for a UMD player for the house or car but Sony for some reason chose to keep it locked up deeming the format useless, yet rather than focus on the gaming they chose to advertise it as this do everything media device while basically downplaying its gaming prowess. As a result the much less capable DS has completely buried the PSP despite the inferior hardware.

I have been trying for months to sell a PSP bundle with over 2 dozen games (admittedly nothing as recent as the last year and a half or so) and cant get any interest at any value more than the joy of taking outside and stomping the crap out of it.

Re:Sony's position is its own fault

[tlhIngan]

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...

Re:Trailblazer?

[93 Escort Wagon]

So, what trailblazing has Sony actually done for consoles?

Sony's innovations aren't really developed with the consumer in mind. The Universal Media Disc, memory sticks, ATRAC-only music players, etc. are all, in varying degrees of blatant-ness, attempts by Sony to drive people into using Sony's own proprietary systems. They announce them as if they're "consumer innovations"; but I imagine the spokespeople have to practice in front of a mirror for a while to be able to keep a straight face when saying that.

You really have to wonder what goes on in the minds of that company's leaders. What other company would develop a PC rootkit and then act surprised when people rebelled?

Re:PSP Go messed it all up

[tepples]

Why is it a problem for you to wait a few hours for a download.

Because what you call "a decent connection" isn't available everywhere, especially out in the country once the farm chores are done. It's faster to ship a UMD across the United States than to download it over satellite or cellular, especially given that three to six full-UMD games would eat up 100% of the 5 to 10 GB/mo caps that all wireless Internet providers impose.

Well part of the problem

[Sycraft-fu]

Is they are used to that in the professional arena. Sony has had some great success in the pro world of forcing an all-Sony solution. The best success is Betacam, the professional cousin to their failed Beta consumer format. Betacam SP was the standard to which everything was compared for the longest time. Nearly all TV was shot on it. When digital formats were coming out it was always talked about like "This looks as good as Betacam SP," or "This gives slightly better colour resolution than Betacam SP." Companies would have all Sony cameras, decks, etc.

What the seem to continually fail to realize is that such a thing doesn't work so well in the consumer space. When you are the sole owner and producer of a technology, your competitors will try and make their own. They'll also try and undercut you, which isn't hard to do with Sony. The consumer market is extremely price sensitive, unlike the pro market.

they have a real mentality of "We can tell you what things are going to be," and get surprised when they don't work out.

You're serious?

[abigsmurf]

They pushed 3D gaming hard, their policy of discouraging developers from releasing 2D games whilst providing them with strong 3D capabilities (so strong they forced Sega, who thought 3D wasn't ready yet, to add an additional CPU and create the develpment nightmare that was the Saturn).

Sony brought gaming to a much wider audience than Sega or Nintendo had managed before. Remember the first Wipeout? Remember how wowed everyone was that they could listen to Progidy and chemical brothers whilst they race? Suddenly gaming was cool amongst nightclub going 20-somethings, not just kids and geeks. They created Gran Turismo, a game with a level of depth and wealth of content that no one had been able to match. They pushed Tony Hawk's Skateboarding, gave FFVII a huge marketing pushes. In every area the PS1 was pushing gaming in new directions and providing rich experiences.

Maybe you weren't part of the generation who grew up watching the consoles go from 8bit to 16bit to 32bit but I find it amazing anyone could brush off Sony's acheivements with both the PS1 and PS2.