The Future of the PSP

IGN has a longish piece up looking at the possible future of Sony's handheld. They examine the upcoming success of Sony's overshadowed creation via several excellent interviews from people with SCEA, first-party developers, third-party studios, and indies. I particularly enjoyed the comments by indie homebrew dev Fanjita, who had a great outsider's view of the little black dynamo. "I suspect there are 2 factors that make them especially resistant to homebrew on the PSP - the first is that point I just made, about not wanting to dent the already shaky platform image. The second is that we already know our way around almost all the PSP internals, and so they probably feel that there's a risk that a publicly endorsed, restricted homebrew platform would soon be cracked wide open, leaving them with an officially endorsed route to piracy. I like to believe that the capable homebrew devs would be respectful of a move from Sony to open up the platform, but it's obviously impossible to have any guarantees."

Re:A doorstop

[Gilzors]

A gaming device? The PSP does that-it's just that the games are basically handheld PS2 games. Sure, there's original stuff out there, but there are lots of ports, and those just haven't propelled it along.

Re:A doorstop

[Bob Gelumph]

I was excited about buying a PSP, but I haven't used it for about 3 or months.
The multimedia stuff is impractical, and I don't really have very much time to play games. I have a job and a wife. And the system is too expensive for kids, so the market can't be too big, except for well-off, single twenty-somethings.

One word: Homebrew

[millennial]

Apart from homebrew, the PSP has no future. Even Sony is stealing ideas from homebrew coders.

Re:A doorstop

[Mr_Silver]

About the only use for one. Just comparing the number of great games on the DS and the PSP, I'd never consider a PSP.

According to Metacritic:

• The NDS has 213 games with 49 rated 75% or more. (source [metacritic.com])
• The PSP has 255 games with 83 rated 75% or more. (source [metacritic.com])

I don't own either (or any console for that matter) but, based on the stats above, it looks like the PSP has more games and more that are considered "excellent".