The PSP - Sony's Missed Opportunity

C|Net passes on the words of Forrester analyst James McQuivey, who lambasts Sony for failing to live up to the opportunity the PSP presented. Though the handheld has certainly been doing better of late, it's hard not to point out that the PlayStation Portable's sales numbers flag in the face of the DS's incredible popularity. McQuivey also makes a point of stating how well the system could have done at taking a slice of Apple's death-grip on the downloadable media market. "'The thing is, Sony could have been all this,' McQuivey said. 'The Sony PSP is one of the best portable entertainment media devices that anyone has come up with in years. It has a relatively big screen, plays video beautifully, has good storage and audio. It could have been the first big mobile carrier for TV shows and movies.' Instead, the mobile-video play of one of the world's largest electronics companies is straggling behind Apple, has shaken the confidence of supporters--especially in Hollywood--and added to the woes of CEO Howard Stringer."

Has Good Storage?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

has good storage

Help me out here. Video iPods have either 30GB or 80GB of storage built in. The PSP has freaky non standard "disks" that users can't burn or proprietary flash storage that nobody outside of Sony uses, nothing built in.

Betamax,UMD,BluRay

[CK2004PA]

Well, if Sony didn't force a non-standard propietary format (UMD) down your throat when you bought one they probably would have done better. They failed with Betamax, then UMD and now BluRay on the PS3Cast.

From the Article

[Anonymous Coward]

the movie industry was pulling for the PSP to emerge as a competitor to the iPod. Steve Jobs won big concessions from the music industry after running away with the digital music market. The film industry didn't want to be thrust into the same position.

In other words the Movie industry is hoping Sony succeeds because Sony will help "protect their profits", largely by forcing users to repurchase their movie collections and pay through the nose for any entertainment they want to watch. Any wagers on why the iPod with a smaller screen and bigger price tag is winning? Maybe consumers aren't the idiots Slashdot'ers think they are?

Re:Betamax,UMD,BluRay

[JordanL]

How is DVD any less proprietary? The only difference is that all the other companies went ahead and paid their licensing fees for it.

Add on top of that the fact that BluRay is outselling HDDVD signifigantly and the "PS3Cast" swipe and I can only assume that your post was nothing but flamboyantly anti-Sony diatribe.

Hmm...

[Pojut]

Despite my thoughts of Sony as a corporation, I must say that I love my PSP. I can rip any of my DVD's and play them right on there with absolutely no modding or anything necessary...I can sit in a coffee shop and browse the net...or I can pop in a game and just do whatever.

And of course, the v1.5 homebrew stuff is always fun.

Sure, the battery kinda blows (which can be very much helped with aftermarket bats) and the loading times a bit slow, but it's still a fantastic little toy.

Add homebrew unfriendly to the list!

[countSudoku()]

Let's not forget the many asinine "security updates" they force fed to us early adopters to keep the homebrew developers from actually adding something useful to that oversized (physically), overpriced (duh), underwhelming (storage) "wish I was a video iPod." I thought they had pulled their collective heads out of their asses, but now that the latest updated supports PS1 downloads, but *only* via another overpriced POS, the PS3, I see that nothing has changed. They made their bed. Lie in it, Sony.

Yeah, I agree, the storage has to be the worst thing about the system, overall. UMD was a joke, right? $20 a pop for less movie/features than a standard DVD... MemoryStick?! Waste of money.
It *could* have been a contender, but it's only a nice widescreen legacy now.

Way to make every wrong turn, Sony... the one and only. :(

Re:Thank God For Homebrew and Custom Firmware

[cascino]

Yes, but this doesn't help the console. If Sony would evaluate their options from the consumer's point of view, we could very easily have these features come standard on the PSP. Instead clever individuals like Dark Alex are engaged in an "arms war" of sorts where each month a new incremental firmware is released by Sony in an attempt to keep end users from taking full advantage of, for example, the PS1-PSP capabilities. The scene is forced underground, and the average consumer is kept unaware of what functionality is possible with the PSP.

I personally have a PSP and must say that being able to play FFVII in full speed on the road is nothing short of amazing. I would have easily put down $10-20 for this capability. The unfortunate part for Sony is that they still doesn't realize that *enabling* the consumer is what sells products, not disabling features from them.

Let me debunk a few things

[vlad_petric]

3. Dead pixel fiasco.

Is one dead pixel per screen such a big deal?? I have a dead pixel on mine and only notice it on completely white backgrounds.

4. Really limited games (no legacy library to pull from)

Are you talking about PSP from 2 years ago? There are quite a few high quality games for the PSP (8.5+ score on gamespot.com/psp). My favorites: Daxter, Burnout Revenge, Metal Gear Acid I and II. I can also argue that DS games are graphics-limited (yes I know, gameplay is more important)

5. Big shiny screen, totally exposed for the scratching when put in a bag

So get a screen protector. Big deal ...

6. Costs more than a DS

30$. For which you get a considerably more powerful CPU & 3D accelerator. Look at screenshots from DS and PSP games.

Ideology aside (Sony is teh evil, Nintendo rocks, graphics is not important), PSP is a pretty decent portable. Sure, it has its issues (e.g., UMD), but it's far from being the failure that the mass media portrays it to be.

too much psp hate

[stlthVector]

I guess I'm the only person on /. who doesn't think the PSP is a failure. I also don't understand the comparisons to the DS. They both play games, that's it. The PSP is a mobile entertainment device. The DS plays games that do not require any advanced hardware. The PSP plays home console quality games, video, music, provides some internet access, makes a great photo viewer, and more. I love sports games and the PSP as an excellent library of sports games. I show them to my friends and their jaws drop. I always get comments like "that looks better than on my ps2" or "that looks like the xbox version".

I don't see how you can compare the two on price. If you choose to, that's you're choice. I guess it doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

It boils down to what you want. If you like the games for the ds, buy a ds!!! Don't buy a PSP! If you like the games for the PSP, and there are a ton for a non-nintendo portable, probably at least 300 now, buy a PSP. If you want something you can rip dvd's and copy them to inexpensive flash media for cheap mobile viewing, get a PSP (I got a 4GB msduopro for $70, hardly expensive). If you want a photo viewer, music player, and a tool for light web browsing, get a psp.

Both the ds and the psp have their place I think. I don't understand all the psp hate. If you like to hate, then go for it. If you want a ds, buy one.

Most people who I have heard talk about PSP haven't played with it much if at all. Check it out if you haven't. Give it a chance. It's been an amazing device for my uses.

Re:Thank God For Homebrew and Custom Firmware

[IvanTheNotSoBad]

You are absolutely right. The only problem is that it only really holds true for us slashdot types (sorry for generalizing). If my little sister saw me playing Super Mario Bros. on my PSP, and she wanted to do the same, do you really think I could just give her those links?

"If you're at firmware 2.70 you could just downgrade to 1.5 and install nesterJ"....her response: "what's a firmware?"

PSP is by far one of the best "gadgets" I've ever come across....but I have to go underground to make it so. On it's own it's crap just like most things Sony make these days. Sony wants to control what you can and cannot do on the device you own...and that's why the PSP is a failure.

Re:Add homebrew unfriendly to the list!

[Frogbert]

Well that is one way of thinking about it.

I happen to have both a DS and a PSP, and I can say without a doubt that if you are into homebrew the PSP is your best bet.

Besides the more powerful hardware the primary advantage is the single storage standard. Homebrew only needs to know how to access the MSPro and that is is, compared to the DS this is a dream. With the DS you need to either program homebrew specifically for the flash device you are using or go with DFDI patches. This is good in theory but in reality the DS homebrew scene is full of almost working apps.

The PSP on the other hand just requires a firmware downgrade followed by a custom firmware flash and you are good to go, the whole process takes about 30 minutes if you have a supported PSP and downgrades are coming out all the time.

Now each systems have their own benefits, and that is why I have both, but to say the PSP is a bad system is a just unfair. I could say that the DS is underpowered, hurts to hold for a long time and needs a better screen and is too difficult to get homebrew working on, but that would be completely avoiding all the good points of the system.

Re:Betamax,UMD,BluRay

[GreatDrok]

"Add on top of that the fact that BluRay is outselling HDDVD signifigantly..."

Remember how Betamax was *THE* video tape format early on but lost out to VHS in the long term because VHS machines were more widely and cheaply available. Many people assume it was porn but in fact it was price. HD DVD still has an opportunity to do the same so I don't think the current rates of BD sales are any reason the claim the format has won.

Re:ODD

[popo]

Not true entirely. You can't play a movie off your memory stick at the PSP's full resolution. Why? Because Sony crippled memory stick playback to give UMD a visual advantage. Once again, Sony's efforts to lock in greater profits end up biting them in the ass. The PSP wasn't half as 'usable' as it could have been, and no self respecting geek wanted one because it was too crippled for effective video download/playback. Once again, Sony limits the options of the consumer -- and loses.

Re:Thank God For Homebrew and Custom Firmware

[colmore]

There's a great Joel on Software about platforms and that in general you want to "commoditize your complements" meaning, if you sell hardware, you want to bend over backwards to make sure that there's cheap available software for you hardware (Mac makes this mistake again and again and again - they should have been working with Borland or someone since forever ago to make developing Mac ports of Windows software easy as pie) and if you sell software, you want cheap available hardware that runs your software. The early adopter crowd clearly was adding software functionality to Sony's hardware, Sony killed the software, and thus removed value from their hardware platform. It's as if Palm were to go in and kill backwards-compatibility for their latest OS, or if Windows 95 had decided not to include DOS compatibility.

$50 for a new video game is a price the market supports. Video games aren't the music industry, you aren't charging near $20 for something that everyone damn well knows is only worth $9 or $10, video games aren't going to see the kind of rampant piracy (that is kids with nothing BUT pirated CDs and MP3s) someone who buys the PSP for MAME is going to wind up buying some of your software too. And if you'd had some sense in pricing those UMD movies (also, TV series and cartoons would have been a better fit to the format - works for urban commuters) they'd have bought those too.

The PSP is just another in a long line of Sony's strategic missteps over the last few years. Treat the customer as your enemy, and let the lawyers do your strategic thinking.