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Third Parties Abandoning PSP
By Joe Keiser
September 23, 2008
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It almost forced everyone to ask, “Just how disappointing is PSP third-party support, anyway?”
Recently the head of Sony Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida called out third parties for their “disappointing” support of the PSP. Calling their lackadaisical attitude a “lost opportunity," he said, “They should look at what the PSP can do for their titles and the potential for the business that their IP has.”
At the time, it felt like a strange move: calling out business partners new and old is a rare stance for an executive to take. It almost forced everyone to ask, “Just how disappointing is PSP third-party support, anyway?”
We did ask, and to find the answer we dug through the handheld’s entire release calendar, to see if third-party neglect is really setting in as the PSP approaches four years old. We also tried to answer a few more questions: How has the PSP been doing with exclusive content? If indeed third-party support has become disappointing, what reasons could there be for that? And what of Sony? Is it leading by example, or is first-party support also limping?
Note: we tried to be generous with our definition of exclusive, but the PSP library is notorious for having slightly different or pared down versions of existing console games that made drawing the line at what constituted a different product difficult. With timed exclusives, it didn’t matter if the game was pulled out for a console release fairly quickly (Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories) or if it took years (Twisted Metal: Head On).
Total releases up to 2007 based on U.S. NPD data. Releases for 2008 corroborated from a variety of sources including retailer lists. Future release totals for the remainder of 2008 based on estimated release dates that are subject to change
A Note on Hardware
Before jumping into software, it’s important to make some quick notes on the growth of the installed base of the platform. While publicly-released NPD statistics on the PSP are spotty in the early goings of the system’s life, it is known that from launch until the end of 2006 6.65 million PSPs were sold in the US. In 2007, 3.82 million units were sold, which can be taken to indicate likely year-on-year sales growth for the platform. About 1.8 million PSPs have been sold in the US in 2008, as of the end of August. Keep in mind that hardware sales increase greatly during the holiday season, and that this compares favorably to the 1.6 million PSPs that Sony sold in the same period in 2007.
The numbers here show PSP hardware sales are growing at a steady clip every year, which is the proper behavior for a healthy platform.
My family is what you would call the average consumer. We don't hack anything and pay retail for everything. We bought 25 UMD movies, and still buy UMD movies. The one thing we won't do is pay over $9.99 for any UMD movies. When UMD movies came out they were HUGELY overpriced, for absolutely nothing but the bare bones of a movie. Now places like Gamestop and Circuit City regularly have them for $4.99 and up, or buy one at $9.99 get one free. There was NO way my family was going to pay $29.99 for Spiderman 3 on UMD. We own it now but at the $9.99 price range. We have started downloading movies from the PSN onto our PS3 and then transferring them to our PSP's, but the DRM that Sony has in acted on that will kill that. When you have 4 PSP's but can only transfer twice that is HORRIBLE...we can switch out one UMD on our 4 PSP's at any given time with no DRM...so that HUGE limit on downloads on the PSN will stop us from buying anymore movies for our PSP's.
We own around 70 games on the PSP. Once again price point is the sticking issue with us. God of War on the PSP for $39.99 is ridiculous. That is just to close of a price to next gen consoles that we end up spending that money on a game for the PS3 or 360. Even $29.99 is a hard sell, but that will have us coming closer to parting with our money then $39.99 ever will. The release forecast for this year however looks horrible. Go to Gamestop.com and just look at future releases for the rest of the year, you get a measly 3 pages, while the DS goes on forever and ever. The story did not cover if there was more difficulty in programming on the PSP as compared to the DS, or licensing fee's imposed by Sony compared to Nintendo...would like to know the actual comparison of in house cost and fee's of both units, that might explain the high cost of games for the PSP.
Finally on top of that is future releases of hardware for the PSP. When the PSP came out there was a ton of hardware for it. I bought a small portable home theater for my PSP, which recently went out. I went to Gamestop to replace and there was nothing, and the few things they had in the way of speaker systems were for the PSP 2000 and not backwards compatible for my PSP 1000. Went to buy a new PSP 2000 and the thing seems actually flimsier then the original. If the PSP 3000 is even flimsier then the 2000, then it won't hold up to everyday use. I understand that you cut cost and parts get cheaper, but on a hand held you don't want to skimp on external parts that break easier...components inside I understand, but don't make the external weaker . I am anxious to actually purchase a new PSP 3000, but if the external make-up is weak and poor I will yet pass again.
So to break it down for us, Price Points on new releases both movies and games are too high, as the product evolves it seems to be getting weaker externally, and there is a huge lack of third party hardware peripherals, and when there is, it isn't backwards compatible.
So there you have, just from an average consumers view.
Looks like you're far from the average consumer if you have 70 PSP games and 25 UMD movies.
The PSP would be storming and breaking records if you were 'average'.
The 'average' PSP consumer has a paperweight gathering dust due to long load times, expensive games, non-existant games, games broken due to missing controls - especially the right analogue, lack of decent online features, poor or no downloadable portable games, a battery thet MUST be charged daily white the unit is in use...
I've spent at least £500 on my PSP and accessories since 2005. It feels like a waste of money. Sony haven't developed the platform.
Surprise surprise - they're out of touch with gaming.
Damn right. My PSP is sitting around doing nothing after God of War and Crisis Core.
Patapon is still fun though. :(
As commented, DS Piracy is easier than PSP piracy - £30 at amazon.com gets you a DS cart.
Games are too expensive on the PSP, the DS regularly has new releases @ £20.
PSP has few good games, and as already stated many of those are ports.
The games I play most often on my PSP are games I bought at release, Hot Shots Golf and Wipeout Pure, the most recent game being Hot Shots Golf 2 whic actually contains pretty much all of the content of HSG1 - if I had just got a PSP and got these games at the same time, I would be pretty annoyed at that.
UMD as a movie format was broken from the start, especially when it was possible to transcode movies yourself from the DVD version.
I own one UMD movie - and I have played it once as I went over to a DVD-ripped version as I could carry that on the MS and still have the UMD slot free.
I only got that UMD as I was curious as to what they were like, and because I could get it for a couple of quid due to crazy pricing in HMV, which was £15 for the DVD, £18 for the UMD (who would pay more for a UMD than a DVD) or £20 for a pack with both.
I would possibly pay £5 for a UMD standalone product, but if they regularly bundled the DVD and UMD with a £2 to £3 premium over the normal DVD cost then I would possibly have a whole lot more UMDs.
WOW. Everybody here is saying that Sony did this and that...... not helping...... confusing..... NO. It's because the immediate moment the PSP was released, people hacked it and downloaded games illegally instead of buying them. Which is why there are the high hardware sales, yet low software sales.
The PSP will only be saved when it becomes un-hackable. Which I believe sony is trying with this new SKU. PSP-3000. Once that is made, other PSP's will slowly become old and stop working, so those who have hacked throughout the years have to buy a new un-hackable PSP and will have to buy games instead of other. OR, sony will release a new form of UMD that isn't rippable, so games can't be pirated.
Or maybe a complete hardware refresh to stop those pesky hackers would help too.
It's only a matter of time before Sony does something solid that helps the PSP. They need to before it's not fix-able.
EDIT: And the only reason why third parties aren't developing for the PSP is because they know that they will have 10x less sales than the illegally downloaded copies of their games. Which is why the chart shows the proof of this, high sales in the beginning, but when people started to illegally download, you see less and less games.
You people shouldn't be saying that Sony is the bad thing blah blah blah. NO, its the hackers who download hundreds of dollars in illegally downloaded games to, I don't know, be cool? save an extra buck here and there? Well I hope somethings done about them, since they are the reason why the PSP is spiraling downward. :|
Look - people hacked the PSP due to there being too much untapped potential.
If there was an app / music / movie/ gamestore active within 12 months of the PSP's launch, and if the handheld wasn't broken for most of the games being released on it (bar driving games), then there would be less temptation to port emulators and applications the machine.
Why - after 3 years of owning a PSP, can I not watch 1 YouTube video on the unit without hacking the console?
@APVangeliLMS
I don't want to defend piracy in any way, but what you are saying is nonsense. Games on the DS are much easier to steal and still no one is talking of fluctuating, let alone decreasing DS sales or 3rd party support. Copy protection never makes less people steal the game - if you want to steal it, there is a way to do it. And then, there are people who play the game only because they can get it for free - they wouldn't buy it anyway.
Suggesting an un-hackable system is laughable. Even if the protection is strong, hackers will find a way to break through, sooner or later. It has always been this way and always will be. Copy protection is not the way to go.
As henryc mentioned, piracy has been around for a long time. The xbox 1 and 360 have been hacked to death, but are number 2 and 1 respectively in largest software attach rate ever. What would make the PSP so special that it is the only system that is grossly effected by piracy when every system since the dawn of man has been hacked to pieces and only effected in the least? My guess why 3rd party sucks on the PSP? Simple...companies haven't been making much money off the games they make for it, so they stopped making games for it. Why are their games not selling? Who knows, quality, marketing? Its any one's guess. Same thing happened with the gamecube. 3rd party games on the gamecube sold poorly, so companies stopped publishing for it. I would guess that the decline will only continue while the DS continues to smash the PSP further into the ground.
While you make a good point that piracy is prevalent on PSP, you're misguided to think it's a major contributing factor in the PSP's success, or lack thereof. Look at the DS: a game is as small as 32 MB and all you literally have to do is copy it to a flash card. Even the original NES cartridges were easy to pirate by just swapping rom circuits - this led to retailers to removing their 30-day return-for-any-reason policies and yes, these actually existed once upon a time - and other systems with strong anti-piracy measures still ended up failing, i.e. Sega Saturn, Nintendo Gamecube.
The PSP's UMDs were also largely unpopular for initially costing much more than DVDs and being inferior in every way: lacking bonus features, can only be played on PSP (universally on any PSP), being proprietary and lacking commercial writers and blank media, and featuring less storage space (1.8 GB < 8.5 GB which most commercial DVDs are).
This article suggests that the writers had a difficult time deciding what counts as a full-fledged title and which are ports, and for good reason: they're mostly ports. Developing for PSP is more expensive, the systems are more expensive, the games are more occupying (read: less portable), and last but not least, Sony has the reputation of being the evil Empire ("We want people to get second and third jobs to get a PS3", "I'll give you $1200 for any PS3 you find lying around", "I want my car to fly and make me breakfast", "We'd rather take crappy 3D games to good 2D games") while Nintendo has the reputation of being the once-and-future (not so future anymore) king.
Don't you realise that you're saying the same thing as me?
People don't like UMDs, so they hack the console and rip the games to memory stick.
They also gain the ability to run hundreds more games.
This in turn reduces the number of games bought, as many more games are traded in.
Preowned sales are affecting the developers profit, as are poor reviews for broken games due to the console's controls.
Game development slows, more people unlock the console to play emulators. Vicious cycle.
double post
I think the main reason is that Sony has too many SKUs and even more than customer confusion, developers have too many choices as to where to develop their games. For Sony alone, there's the PSP (already seeing its third iteration this fall), the PS3 (a clusterfuck of SKUs), the PSN, and the PS2, which still has a whopping 130 new titles in the pipeline. It doesn't help that all these platforms are second-tier compared to the DS, Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and the PS3 respectively.
>>Without a killer app in the West on the level of Japan’s Monster Hunter series
so it's doing great in Asia, yeah?
the article sounds like it's mainly talking about the US, or just in the west. I guess even if you're the 'Global Game Industry Network', it's still mostly english speakers doing the writing
1. Sony presents PSP: retailers tell publishers to go full on PSP.
2. Nintendo presents DS: retailers tell publishers to really go full on PSP.
3. Nintendo releases killer apps after killer apps: retailers tell publisher to go full on DS!
4. Sony US and Europe deny approvals of unique games, of teams without a publisher behind them, requier games to have features unecessary to the gameplay just to show the PSP is technically better than a DS and propose too expensive dev kits.
5. Approval and testing staff is moved from PSP to PS3 to make sure the next gen machine has the best launch possible.
How, after all that, do you expect killer apps SONY? You don't have them and you are not allowing others to make them.
1. Simplify the approval process.
2. Remove design requierements.
3. Allow teams without publishers to develop.
4. Reduce dev kit prices.
5. Start the store ONLINE already, on PSP! So teams can publish without retailers approval!
That would be a start.
I think it should be noted that vice city stories , in my opinion of course, utterly failed to deliver the goods : the missions were frustrating and difficult and were made even harder by the poor and inaccurate controls that made shooting your enemies a hit and miss affair. Added to that , Rockstar still insisted on taking away all weapons and armour when the player died rather than asking "retry mission y/n?"
Also, not Rockstars fault but Sony's, I cant think of any game more in need of a right stick camera than gta and the psp doesnt have one!
How much this explains a 60% decrease in sales, however, i obviously cant tell you!
The typo has been fixed.
First off, there's a typo in the home page headline.
These are NPD numbers so its US only. With that out of the way, what is the 3rd party support like in Japan? There are a lot of games released in Japan that don't get released in the US, and with the success of games like Monster Hunter, what's the outlook on some of those games coming over to the US?
Before people jump in with the "piracy" argument, keep in mind that its not really that easy to hack the PSP unless you happen to have a first generation, non-updated PSP. Obviously, those aren't that easy to find. The DS is a lot easier to hack, and it still does pretty well with the third party support.
GTA Liberty City was used to hack the PSP. Starting the game with a manipulated save game was the way to install a hacked version of the firmware. Joystiq or Kotaku ran a piece on that. So much for those sales.
During my last vacation I saw many bootlegers offering to "install any game to my psp". I asked how they would do that and one of them finally told me that they would used something called a Pandora Battery and a Memory Stick. They said that using that could install a hacked firmware on absolutely any PSP no matter which hardware or software revision it was.
I'm not saying it can't be done. Its true, any current version of the PSP can be hacked (we'll see if they add any new measures to the new 3000 model). However, hacking a DS involves just buying an R4 chip and plugging it in. If you do a little Googling you'll find that hacking a PSP requires a bit more effort than that, since the large majority of people aren't going to have easy access to a Pandora Battery. The Internet gives you all the tools you need to get access to one, but its still a lot easier to just go buy an R4.
That said, my point still stands: piracy doesn't explain the lack of third party support. The DS is easier to hack relative to the PSP, yet still has a lot of 3rd party support. I'd normally blame this on a small user base, but the PSP actually has a pretty large one.
Why would anybody be able to buy a R4, but not be able to buy a Pandora from the same store?? It can't be that more expensive, it's not even a custom chip such as the R4, it's a battery. People did not chip their consoles themselves in the past, why would they do so now? Sony claims to have sold more than 20 million PsP units, that's about as many as 360. But the number of really good games is ridiculously low. And if they are good, they are usually not games you can play while being outside. Most of the time the screen will be too dark, the games will have almost no contrast when outside and they do not have the right rhythm to be played on the bus.
That truly is one of the negatives of the Poospe. I don't really care about playing GTA on the road, I would rather enjoy it at full resolution and anti-aliasing on my Phuk. Duhs games are better suited for true portable gaming. Even considering the Duhs iteration of GTA, it will be built from the ground up for the Duhs, devoid of the: "Look we fitted a full-fledged GTA game, graphics and all on a portable device!" that was present with the Poospe version.
When I buy a Duhs or a Poospe, it is for portable gaming, not replaying my Phuk games on a small screen.
Sorry, for the double post, I have connection trouble and it posted my post twice. So I edited it not to tereat what I stated once already, since I can't figure out how to delete it.