Did the recent unveiling of Nintendo’s DS successor, the 3DS, raise your hopes for a similar announcement of a PSP successor? Well, don’t expect a PSP2 anytime soon. As VG247 reports, SCEA’s John Koller has confirmed that the PSP will have a 10 year life cycle, putting any speculation about a PSP successor to rest.
“There is absolutely a 10-year life cycle for PSP, and probably more,” he said. “We’ve talked about ‘We’ll be in the PSP business as long as we’re in the PlayStation business’, because we absolutely believe in handheld.
“Unequivocally we think it’s a fantastic place to be, and I can tell you that I think my group particularly – the hardware group – fully believes in handheld because there’s different demographics that you can touch and bring in to the PlayStation world through it that you may not always be able to do through other avenues.
“You can touch older females, older males, younger children, you can kind of piece all of these different target audiences and demographics under a handheld umbrella much more seamlessly.
“I think it’s a long term opportunity and we will stay in it. Now in terms of where we are in the current life cycle, I think we’re just kind of hitting our stride. We just announced that we hit 60 million units worldwide, which is a very good number for PSP, we’ve got a lot of good development support.
“We always say a platform will turn off when the development spicket turns off. We’ve got 70 games coming this year, we’ve got 70-80 coming next year – it’s just a very healthy platform.
“I don’t think we’d be spending investment to the tune that we are without full belief that this is a go-forward platform.”
Of course, he said nothing about how the sales of the PSP have consistently lagged behind the DS’s, or how software sales for the platform are abysmal. He also declined to say anything at all about the strong third party support and goodwill from hardcore gamers that the DS enjoys, also neglecting to comment on the 3DS.
He did however, admit that Sony had misjudged gamers’ attachment to physical game media with the launch of the PSP Go, thereby getting as close as he ever will to admitting that the Go was an unmitigated failure.
This effectively puts any rumours of the PSP2 to rest. Going into E3, there’d been loads of those flying all over the place, whereas several ‘credible sources’ had confirmed that Sony would be launching a PSP2 at TGS. So for those who were still holding out for the announcement, don’t. We’ve heard it from the horse’s mout: there is no PSP2, not for another couple of years, at least.