PSP - Lukewarm In Japan?

September 27th, 2006, 01:25 Posted By: wraggster

Via Gamasutra

As regular Japanese chartwatchers may have spotted, Sony's portable console is doing merely OK in the territory, and is lagging majorly behind the runaway success of the DS. Why might that be? Ricciardi has a theory: "I think there's some kind of disconnect between the people who create the hardware and the people who sell it." He believes that the PSP has amazing hardware - he commented that when he first picked it up, "I felt like I was holding the future", but the game-based ramifications of the hardware are not well thought through.

As he notes, the games are often great-looking, but it "costs almost as much to make a [PSP] game as to make a PS2 game", meaning a significant barrier to entry into the development market for PSP games. In addition, issues like loading times do not play well to the Japanese market - when "playing it on a go... you can't afford to wait 2 minutes for the game to load", Ricciardi sagely notes.

Not only this, Sony's big hope LocoRoco, which even had an associated hardware bundle, "didn't sell nearly as well as I think it should have" in Japan, Ricciardi notes - a sentiment many observers agree with. He continues: "That shows there's a problem with the PSP... [LocoRoco] is clearly an A caliber game, but because there's so much stuff that people aren't interested in, it got lost in a cloud of crummy games. I don't know how they're going to get around that."

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