The Future of the PSP
By: TCLCloud, Founder of PSP117
Firstly,
I’d like to say that the PSP is not dead; neither is it dying in fact. There
have been a lot of articles lately saying how the PSP is dying out when in the
fact it’s not at all. PSP sales may not be as high as the DS but then they are
still at a consistent rate every month while the DS will fade out now seeing as
it’s already released its highest profile games.
The PSP, on the other hand, still has a lot of big games to release in the
future: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories and Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core are just 2 of the future big hits. I’m sure both of these
titles will be huge and the only thing that could be better than a new GTA or
Final Fantasy is of course the PSOne emulator for the PSP. Sony hasn’t
confirmed how this will work yet but we know it’ll be released this Autumn and there are a few theories on how it might work……
It
seems most likely that Sony will make the PSOne ROMs available to download from
a portal and are then saved onto your memory stick. Sony may even release new
memory sticks with games preloaded onto them. However if the price of them
doesn't fall then it could well have a negative impact on the sale of PSOne
ROMs.
On another note I don’t think that UMD films are quite dead either. The price
of them was high but now its seems they are falling
every few weeks. On Amazon the price of UMD’s has fallen to around £10 or less!
As long as the best films and series are available to watch on the PSP cheaply
then I can’t see the UMD being phased out as quickly as everyone is
speculating.
Also set for release soon is the PSP camera, which is supposed to have an
eye-toy type game being made available for it and video calls over wireless
internet. Another add-on for the PSP is also the GPS receiver which is meant to
be used for things like SatNav I’d imagine but could also be incorporated into
games. Both of these devices are set to be released around September/October
time this year.
To sum up, the future of the PSP is bright at least. Just this year
we’re set to have some great new games, digital camera and GPS and of course
the PSOne emulator all on our PSP systems, which is set to have around 7000
ROMS to play by the end of 2007