All I Want for New Year's Is...
So, this article pretty much kicked off this train of thought for me. The PSP is still in a strange place, as it's got cool marketing appeal (the worst guerilla marketers on this side of a MySpace PM spam aside), and people seem to be buying systems, even if I think that the core unit should be less expensive to be competitive with Nintendo. However, as the Next Gen article points out, software sales have been sluggish. The spin seems to be more toward marketing the PSP's multimedia capabilities, especially as memory storage eclipses UMD size.
In my opinion, if Sony wants the PSP to truly take gaming out of the handheld ghetto, all fingers point towards UMD price drops. While hardware sales have been good, it's tougher and tougher to justify spending $40 or $50 on a handheld game that pales in comparison to its PS2 counterpart, especially when there's missing functionality.
So, Sony, you think I forgot about Passport to..., didn't 'cha?
Rockstar seems to have the right idea. I've got a ROM of The Warriors for PSP sitting next to me. While I'm not allowed to discuss the game until tomorrow's online press embargo lifts, the game is retailing for $19.99. For a year-old game that was great, but sold tepidly, this could be a shot in the arm. Maybe new pricing will be a shot for the now-$29.99 GTA: Vice City Stories, which didn't seem to be the blockbuster that Liberty City Stories was. Of course, that could also be due to the release of LCS on PS2, which has, in my opinion, undermined the sales of VCS. Why should anyone buy the PSP game, gamers think, when they can wait until summertime for a PS2 port? Still, $29.99 seems to be the price point that upcoming titles are hovering around, with the exception of titles from bigger publishers such as EA, and SCEA's first-party titles, which are between $39.99 and $49.99 upon release. Let's hope it becomes the standard.
Finally, it would be wonderful if Sony could figure out a way to utilize all of those PS3 retail kiosks to set up an additional download station for PSP owners. It'd be nice to buy all of those PlayStation classics without either owning a PS3 or having to go to a friend's house. Maybe PC distribution isn't realistic due to security concerns, but PSP owners ought to be able to get all of those classics on their system.
I'm certainly less angry about the current state of the PSP than I was six months ago when I kicked off the column, but there are some things that are still missing Stateside. MGS: Portable Ops reminded me that we still don't have a GPS. There's still no Talkman. Also, when is the US going to get some Passport to... action in our handhelds?
Otherwise, with the exception of a scare regarding a misplaced PSP in Las Vegas, I've been playing it a good amount. It's a fairly trusty machine, and in between logging in a little more Portable Ops time, I'm obsessively preparing my Winning Eleven rosters for a big tweak when WE 2007 drops. Strangely, I played more Winning Eleven 9 than any other game on the PSP all year. It's just a good game for travel, and that's part of what I like about the PSP.
