It's not controversial to state that pretty much no one likes the PSP's UMD drive, but it might raise eyebrows to suggest that Sony itself was never that into the whole tiny optical disk concept.
That's the conclusion to be drawn from an interview given to Japanese website GameBusiness by Naoya Matsui, who heads up the Sony Computer Entertainment product planning division.
Planned all along
In it, he claimed that Sony always planned to release a handheld gamer, like the PSP Go, without a UMD drive.
"We'd planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning," he's reported as saying.
No physical media
According to Matsui, Sony has been waiting for the electronic delivery mechanisms to mature sufficiently to make physical media redundant.
He explained: "We wanted to release it when the delivery of digital content was on par with the delivery of physical media. That's what we've been working on these past two years."
Whether Sony really did have the UMD's demise planned when the original PSP launched in 2004, we'll never really know, but come October's PSP Go launch, we'll definitely get a feel for life without those unloved little disks.
Via Develop
Your comments (4) Click to add a new comment
saveusjeebus
July 7th
4. Sony has a fetish for horrible proprietary formats that wind up going nowhere and suck. My Sony phone takes some kind of "memory stick M2 pro" that nobody sells and the few places that do sell it for 5x what a mini SD card goes for. Sony has good hardware design and excellent power usage design, but god help their stupid formats.
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badgaz
July 5th
3. Such a load of rubbish you really think they created their own media format, pushed it for both movies and games just for it to fail? They're just making excuses for the failure and are going to try and emulate the success of the App Store.
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craiggrannell
July 5th
2. "We'd planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning"
Mm. I call bullsh*t on that comment. Sony's hardly known for being the most honest company, but this sounds like hogwash. UMD was originally touted as a direct competitor to DVD. The fact the format sucked probably then led to Sony realising it had another lemon on its hands (see also: DAT, which was a disaster from a consumer standpoint).
I'm also sure that the App Store's success had nothing to do with Sony somewhat rapidly trying to embrace the digital space more definitely for its handheld. *cough*
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khsbenny
July 4th
1. Still only one joystick. When will they learn?
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