Slashdot Mirror
Should Sony Team With Google On a PlayStation Phone?
donniebaseball23 writes "The PSP2 is already in the hands of developers, but will Sony take the right direction in the portable sector? Following a recent op-ed on fixing the PSP business, leading game industry analysts came to the consensus that the best avenue for Sony to take is to offer a PlayStation Phone, and a strong partner like Google would do just the trick. 'Sony has the opportunity to redefine the portable games category. I think the best move would be to get out in front of Microsoft's inevitable Xbox LIVE Arcade Mobile and take on the App Store and carrier deck portals. ... They could put out a proper PlayStation Phone (and a PlayStation Pad) but these should compete with smartphones and tablets, not dedicated gaming devices. To do this quickly, Sony could partner with Google and take advantage of Android's considerable momentum,' said Billy Pidgeon of M2 Research."
There is one major advantage that all Sony, Google and Android are missing - good support for game developers tools, availability of indie games and the support of 23 million Xbox Live subscripters.
However, the upcoming Windows Mobile 7 has all those advantages. You can easily develop for it using C# and Microsoft provides libraries and environments like XNA. Also, when you develop using C# and XNA, the game instantly works on all PC, Xbox 360 and the upcoming mobile phones. A huge advantage for developers.
On the other hand, Sony's PSP is just a gaming device. By this age it's way too much to carry around mobile phone, gaming device and everything else. Mobile devices are a lot more powerful now and you can fit everything in your phone.
Developers also hate coding for Sony's systems. I think both Gabe Newell and John Carmack have said developing for them is absolute nightmare and programming for them is completely different from other consoles. Microsoft here has huge advantage since the code you make works for big amount of other platforms. At most you only need to rewrite the graphics and maybe some game logic, but with indie games you may not even need to do that.
These are all the things that both Sony and Google are missing. iPhone developers also wont shy away from developing for Windows Mobile as it's practically the same and the market is/will be huge. I don't think the future of gaming will be PSP, it will be Windows Mobile.
The reason I'm not porting my soon to be released Flash game on iPhone or Android is that the processing power is too low. If there was a serious chip in these phones, higher quality games can be made. I'm thinking in the future many high quality games will be made in Flash.
Or, perhaps you could take Adobe's dick out of your mouth long enough to learn how to program in a REAL LANGUAGE that doesn't need to max out 4 3GHz cores to run a fucking animation. Failing that, maybe go play in traffic.