best chance to beat apple is the ds since so many kids have them and can upgrade to dsi

sony psp go is about 5 years too late

Sony sold 50 million PSP over the past 5 years. If they do that again with PSP Go, that means by 2015 they’ll have as many users as iPhone OS has today. And iPhone OS is going to be on larger devices at some point soon also.

Phones and media players typically sell in much greater quantities than gaming devices. For example, there are more iPod touch than PlayStation3. So Apple having a 50 million user head start on PSP Go is going to be hard for Sony to make up.

Just the fact that Sony is launching a new “more iPod-like” gaming device and getting developers to port iPod games already says a lot when you consider the PSP had a 3-4 year head start on iPod touch.

Apple rules pocket music and movies and apps. Sony is going to have to start acting like one large company, not hundreds of small ones if they are going to compete with Apple. Sony has to make their own OS X or get out of the business. The fact that they don’t know this yet makes the getting out of the business part that much more probable.

I would love to be at that stage and I know we will get there, but we will get there.

Good enough.

All your comments are valid. But, the smart phones will push the dedicated game consoles into a tiny corner.

Think about the following:

1. The old UMD system is now a thing of the past, all games must be downloaded. Which in effect mirrors the App-Stores mechanic.

2. The PSP Go is way more powerful. I spoke to a SCEA exec at E3 and he let me play with the Go for about 45 minutes. Here is what I found on a side by side comparison:

Movies: The movies on the Go were a lot more sharper and looked like a HD experience.

Games: Were a lot faster, I was comparing Gran Tourismo Vs Real Racing, both are outstanding games and both performed well, but GT was better just because the platform allowed it to be.

Pricing: Games on the Go will have two categories:

Premium: Publishers can charge what they like, so you can expect to pay up to $35-40 a pop.

App-Store: here you will see prices of .99, 1.99, 2.99, 3.99 and 4.99.

I know of a lot of the top performers on the iPhone that have either built a PSP Go port or are in the process of doing so.

Actually a lot of established developers are trying to license successful iPhone games for the Go.

3. SCEA/SCEE have reduced the price of the dev kit to $1,500.00 from $15,000.00. This is fantastic for two reasons, it makes the dev kit affordable to smaller guys and it will greatly reduce the amount of crap-apps on their app-store. This is a problem that Apple lives with today. There is an abundance of completely useless apps on the App-Store.

4. Anyone can buy the dev kit and Sony has scrapped their former approval process i.e. build the game and then hope it is approved. As long as you don’t go nuts and break their terms i.e. sex, profanity etc you are good to go.

The only thing I don’t get is that Japan is not included in the above. You will need to find an established publisher if you want to publish there.

5. The price is pretty reasonable, Sony products are always on the higher end of the spectrum. At $245, I think that is pretty decent for what you are getting. True the Nintendo DSi is a lot cheaper, but to be perfectly frank, I think that the DSi is a bit of a joke in terms of being a gaming device.

The psp Go is light, slick and cool.

The DSi is a brick.

One is that the console guys were so quick to dismiss the potent combination of game title diversity, low price and one-click ease of purchase/download/use, combined with the fact that this was riding on top of a device that already serves a bunch of compelling uses (iPod, Web, email, phone) for consumers,that they failed to see the iPhone/iPod Touch for what it was; a classic low-end disruptor.

Plus, I think they failed to grok the iPhone + iPod Touch 1+1=3 relationship (combined with rich SDK toolset) in creating compelling numbers for developers.

The other bit of irony is Apple is often knocked for pushing an integrated hardware, software, services and tools solution relative to its more horizontally oriented competitors. Yet, in this case, Apple is beating/disrupting the dedicated gaming console space by being (relatively speaking) more loosely coupled, and a more open, easy to program for platform.

More fodder on this one can be found at my post:

Apple’s Mobile Gaming Gold Rush
http://bit.ly/2f1QeJ

Check it out.

Mark

The iPhone is a good enough camera.
The iPhone is a good enough phone.
The iPhone is a good enough music player.
The iPhone is a good enough gaming platform.

Your iPhone is always with you.

In 10 years (or less), the iPhone will come with 1TB of storage. It will be 32x faster.