Even With A Hardware Update, Is The PSP On Life Support?

August 28th, 2008, 23:22 Posted By: wraggster

Hold onto your limited edition Stealth UMD. It’s been a cruel summer for PlayStation Portable fans and it’s not going get any better between now and ‘09. Considering you can’t can’t walk three feet in Wal-Mart or two steps past a glittery-nailed ‘tween (txt me, Kelli!) without stumbling across one of Nintendo’s 70 million-unit moving DS, we recently noticed the more technologically talented of the two handhelds has had a less than stellar year when it comes to software.

Surefire blockbusters aside – and really, who can resist killer apps like Petz Saddle Club and the ever-popular My Spanish Coach– times are definitely tough for the little high-tech paperweight that could. Throw out the titles with “TBA” for a date and the schlock with a concrete delivery day and the current release projections show less than 30 unique PSP titles due before 2009, or fewer titles than the DS will see in the month of September alone. The release schedule might change but the scientific fact remains that saying My Little Pony Pinkie Pie’s Party five times will result in you actually growing a vagina.

For the record, the recently-announced PSP-3000 isn’t much consolation. What were looking for here is a little love– i.e. a decent frappin’ game– not a more glare-resistant screen, sharper colors and built-in microphone for whispering sweet nothings to your secretly closeted ex-roommate while playing hide-the-pigskin in Madden.

Which begs the question: What the hell happened to the darling of homebrew software enthusiasts and DVD junkies anyhow? Why, it seems like just two halcyon years ago we all thought Shigeru Miyamoto would soon be busking for yen in an Osaka railway station while Sir Howard Stringer snorted Colombian pure off a Brazilian supermodel’s taut ass to celebrate 15 digit PSP-fueled profits. Bummer. Determined to find out, we asked a few of the industry’s best and brightest.

“Simple… Sony over-engineered the PSP, and as a result, it’s become a no-man’s land,” explains Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter, in typically understated fashion. “The system’s caught in this grey area: You can’t make a title of PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 quality for it, but you can sell way more copies of simpler, less far-reaching games on the DS instead. It’s more expensive to develop for the system too: As a developer, you can make a $50,000 title for the iPhone, or pay $1 million for a PSP outing – which do you think goes over better?”

http://www.dasgamer.com/even-with-a-...-life-support/

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