You Win Some, You Lose Some

Over the holidays, I became the new owner of both a Sony PSP as well as a Toshiba HD-DVD player.  The former has proven quite satisfactory - I only have a handful of games for it, but it’s been really fun playing both Jeanne D’Arc and Ratchet & Clank (which I’ve been wanting to play for some time).  There definitely seem to be enough of a library to keep me occupied for the foreseeable future, and the slim design is quite nice - although the analog stick feels a little flimsy.  My only real complaint is the anemic battery life, which just looks worse relative to the DS’s never-ending power supply.  I don’t think this is anything you haven’t heard before, though.

On the other hand, my joy in owning an A3-HD was considerably dulled by Warner Bros.’ announcement today that they are discontinuing HD-DVD support.  Whether this puts the nail in HD-DVD’s coffin is still, I suppose, up for debate, but things don’t look great.  I have two reactions: first, waiting until after the holiday shopping rush to make the announcement was a pretty classless move on Warner Brothers’ part, and one that is likely to engender some ill will with consumers.  And second, I don’t see myself buying a Blu-Ray player in the near future.  The cost difference between HD players and BR is still enormous - standalone Blu-Ray players are starting on Amazon at around $320, whereas I bought my A3 for only $170 with 10 free discs.  I had - and have - no real preference for one format over the other per se, but this cost difference is prohibitive for mainstream consumers.  In my opinion, at present the PS3 is far and away the best Blu-Ray option out there.  But it’s still going to take a while for the cost to drop into a feasible range for me… the A3 does a great job with upconversion and it’s still not worth it to me to go fully HD when the media themselves are still much more costly than a DVD (and likely to remain so if HD-DVD goes away and removes that competitive pressure).  In sum, I’m rather irritated with Warner, but I don’t see this having a big impact on my short-term purchasing decisions.

PSPopped

Was just at Best Buy and discovered that all their PSPs (and DS’s) were entirely sold out.  A sign of the handheld times, I suppose.

Double-Facing Kotaku On The PSP

I’m going to both agree and disagree with Kotaku (or more specifically, with Mark Wilson) simultaneously.  Jason Chen of Gizmodo wrote a column entitled “Why the PSP Might Overtake the DS.”  It was, as Wilson points out, an interesting variation of Xeno’s Paradox - well-reasoned, articulate, and deeply flawed.  I’ll provide an overview of the article, then discuss why the entire conversation is off-base.

Chen’s post contains 8 pieces of evidence for the PSP’s ultimate domination.  I’ll let you read them in detail or yourself, but they all fall into one of three categories:

• Sales momentum: The PSP has sold 1M units in Japan in two months, sales for the PSP are up while the DS’s are down, and the PSP has sold as many units as the PS2.
• Product quality: The PSP has more highly-rated games, as well as more add-ons and media interactivity.

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Fun With Statistics, Part IV

You have to love a press release that names percentages rather than whole numbers.  For example, this Sony release on the sales of PS3s this Black Friday vs. last year’s.  When you have nice round numbers like 178%, you know things are looking good.

The PSP Comes Into Its Own

A funny thing happened over the past year - the PSP became something more than a novelty.  I’ve had my eye on it for a while now, but it wasn’t till I read IGN’s holiday shopping guide that it occurred to me just how many PSP games interest me.  A shortlist: Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, Jeanne D’Arc, Ratchet and Clank, Silent Hill Origins, and to a lesser extent Socom and MGS.  That’s not to say that all of them intrigue me equally, but these are all solid titles that belie the PSP’s near-invisibility relative to the DS.

In any case, I’m considering picking up a PSP this holiday season if I can find some decent deals.  Anyone else out there have one?  Is it worth buying?

(Why the PSP is having so much trouble is out of scope for this discussion, but it seems to me that people play the DS very differently than they do Sony’s miniature device.  The games I’ve listed are essentially variations on hardcore franchises.  Yet Japanese gamers have been flocking to the Brain Ages of the world on DS - is it possible that their interests have shifted over the past few years?)

Manhunt 2 Part Deux

I will stipulate that the absurd firestorm over Manhunt 2 was both ridiculous and pointless.  I will go further and agree that the game should never have been given an AO rating, and that even had it been given such a rating it should never have been censored.  Yet for all these facts, I cannot conclude that simply disabling offensive content was anything other than unmitigated stupidity. 

Has Rockstar learned absolutely nothing from Hot Coffee?  The big lesson of GTA III was that regardless of what merit the gaming industry’s arguments had, including content like this is asking for a PR nightmare.  I can accept that such a nightmare wasn’t particularly foreseeable back when this occurred, since it was isolated content that few people knew existed and wasn’t particularly offensive to begin with.  But not knowing that this would happen now - after everything Rockstar went through to get the game released in the first place - is inexcusable.  Rockstar already knew that gamers would likely eventually discover how to enable disabled content.  They already knew that people were gunning for their company and the industry as a whole based on the previous Manhunt content.  And they knew that they were dangerously close to getting the industry regulated because of their love of foolish publicity stunts.  This kind of stunt manages to keep this silly debate alive longer while undermining everything the ESRB and gamers have been saying about the effectiveness of self-policing. 

Someone at Rockstar should resign for this, and if they don’t resign, they should be fired.  Immediately.

One-Liners Part II

I’m not sure how many people actually hate these, but I have about 20 minutes left before I board my flight… so I thought I’d try to catch up quickly on anything I’ve missed in the last few days.

- In what universe does telling a company that has agreed but failed to comply with your regulations constitute a “sucker punch“?

- I’m as tired of the guy as anyone, but any Jack Thompson fight that can be drawn out over 4 posts is amusing enough to warrant a mention.

- If Lifetime really thinks that “women’s casual gaming” is equivalent to “Golden Girls Trivia” and “Sally’s Salon,” both they and their audience should feel very dirty.

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Sony Has A Portable System?

We don’t spend much time on the PSP here, largely because neither of us owns one, but Press The Buttons has a few minireviews of PSP games that slip under our radar.  The short version is that there are actually quite a few good ones, including a Mega Man game that has mercifully escaped the crapulence to which every other recent iteration has succumbed.

Oddly enough, most of the games reviewed appear to be franchise titles… something I would not have expected.

The PSP’s Golden Age?

The general consensus for most gamers over the past few years has been that the DS has really beaten the crap out of the PSP, both in terms of sales and critical response.  Once in awhile, there was a game that seemed ok for the PSP, but in general nothing that seemed to match the onslaught of good and creative games that had been coming out for the DS.

But, lately, there have been a few PSP games that have stirred my interest, like MGS: Portable Ops and Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters (I’m a sucker for the series).  With the recent price drop, I decided I’d take a look at what games were out there that had been well reviewed, and what I found was somewhat surprising.

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In Which I Compliment the PSP (Sort Of)

Gamasutra has a very interesting take on the PSP, which I had pretty much written off at this point.  As the article points out, the PSP has actually sold fairly respectably; Ed Barton of Screen Digest estimates cumulative software sales of about $4.5B by the end of 2007.  The problem is that relative to its competitor, the Nintendo DS, it’s an extremely distant second.

I can’t consider anything that sells that much an out-and-out failure by any means.  It would help to know the total cost to Sony and the developers to determine just how profitable this enterprise is, but in any case not a failure at all.  But how does Sony leverage this investment into something that could really compete with the DS?

I think the “answer” here is in something David Cole (DFC Intelligence) says.  When asked about his general thoughts, he responds:

“[T]he PSP could really use a new model.  This has been the secret to Nintendo’s success. When GBA sales slowed, Nintendo introduced the GBA SP, which addressed many of the system’s problems. Ditto introducing the DS Lite last year to improve on the DS. Much will depend on how much emphasis Sony plans to put on the system going forward.”

The key here isn’t the need to push a new model per se, it’s to build on the goodwill that Sony’s developed through the PSP.  You’re able to leverage the franchises you’ve developed to produce new, more polished iterations that appeal to former fans while creating new ones.  This is a strategy that Nintendo’s perfected - people bought the DS because they anticipated strong updates of old franchises plus clever twists due to the touchscreen interface and dual screens. 

This is something of a catch-22 for Sony though.  They need to be willing to invest in pushing lots of new quality software that won’t sell with DS numbers, and keep that support up in both first and third parties, at the same time that it develops future PSP models.  Nintendo has a huge lead, and it’s going to take a lot to dent that support.  That said, it seems pretty clear that there’s an appetite for an up-market handheld, and if Sony doesn’t mind being 2nd, it might stay in that position very profitably.