Archive for PSPgo
Select PSPGo Games May Look Just Like iPhone Games
Posted by: | Comments
According to an unconfirmed leak by PocketGamer, Sony will not only price downloadable PSPGo titles at prices competitive with the App Store—the company is actually recruiting iPhone developers to port their games to the Go.
Pocketgamer reports that at least some iPhone developers will have a place in Sony’s PSN service where games will go for “1, 2 and 5 Euros” (or $1.50-$7). But It will take some fudging to port their titles from the iPhone’s 480×320 display to the Go’s 480×272 display.
If the rumor is true, hats off to Sony for updating their PSP business model to stay competitive with the long-convenient cellphone gaming industry. But at the same time, pricing across services could get a bit tricky. And if I’m offered a game at full resolution or an adjusted, lower resolution, I know which one I’m choosing.
I love the logic at Sony: They wish now that the PSP had dual analog sticks, and thought about adding them to the PSPgo, but they didn’t want to trip up developers who’d gotten used to developing around terrible controls.
Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida told Game Informer:
We also felt – like many users – that we wish we had a second analog on the PSP. But we are talking about the mid-life cycle of this platform, and the PSPgo is designed to be perfectly compatible with the PSP-3000 and all the games that released before that. So we had a very serious discussion about this particular subject, but we decided not to add a second analog, and some of the developers are doing quite a nice job translating the second analog functionality to different buttons. We didn’t want to divert their efforts either.
So even though Sony knows that dual analog sticks would make for a better control experience, they’d rather keep things basically the same so stuff stays consistently less-than-optimal across PSPs. And besides, developers have sorta figured out now how to work around the deficiencies. Mhmm.
Does this mean we’ll have to wait until the end of the PSP’s 10-year life cycle to get twin sticks?
