The PSP Was Always Meant to Be UMD-Free
July 5, 2009 by srfto
The PSP is going to be the first “real” handheld to go directly to digital distribution, but apparently they’ve been waiting to dive into it for a very long time.
Naoya Matsui of Sony’s product planning division spoke with Japanese game site GameBusiness.jp about their initial plans with the PSP and how they’ve worked towards finally being able to make the PSP IP go full-digital.
“We’d planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning,” said Matsui. He continues to say that if they had done it from the get-go, “there wouldn’t have been much for everyone to enjoy. We needed to prepare the right environment for it first – things like the transferral of content with the PS3 and PSN, and PC software to manage content like music and movies such as Media Go.
Sony waited digital content delivery to reach the efficiency of physical, which they believe has finally happened. The PSP Go is meant to be targeted at those who are “more accustomed to digital content,” while the existing PSP will remain on shelves.
But in reality, the chances of publishers continuing to support physical UMDs are low considering the theoretical cost difference between physical publishing and digital distribution. The PSP Go seems to reaching out the the gadget market and not the game market, which makes the future of the Go as a “console” seem a bit iffy.
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