I think the PSP is vastly miscalculating what kinds of games make good portable games. Or, more likely, they are trying to create a new market that may not ever materialize.
The PSP is putting it’s bets on sports games and first person shooters. They are aiming for a young male gaming market and not a lot else.
But I’m not sure this is the right route for portable games. Traditionally portable games are more oriented towards puzzle games, turn-based games of all sorts and recently tactics games. People traditonally want games that don’t ask for a lot of immersions, can be put down quickly, and can be played without sound. They want something they can play on the bus, or quietly during class, or while they are waiting to meet someone. Do you really want to play a shooter on a bus?
Portables also attract a wider market. Not everyone wants to sit at home playing console games, but everyone can see the appeal of having a game they can take with them. Cheap entry prices, unintimidating games, and games with broad appeal make portable systems popular among all sorts of non-gamers, including chidren.
I’m not sure Sony’s plan is going to work- and disappointing sales thus far bear this out. The low battery life implies that they expect gamers to do a lot of their PSP gaming at home, which I’m not sure that gamers really want to do. Their market of hard-core young male mostly-non-geek gamers is too narrow, and the unit is to expensive to really attract any new markets. Their sports games (except the racing games) lack in the actual game play and seem like hobbled verions of the console games. A few of the games seem spectacular, but not enough to make me want to shell out $250 when I’ve got a perfectly good PS2 sitting right here.
Meanwhile, Nintendo is doing a lot better with the DS than I ever thought. I figured the touch screens were just a gimmick and we’d just be getting more of the same. But nearly every game really uses the touch screen and we are seeing entirely new game concepts emerge. The games are well-suited to portable play- I can’t think of anything more brilliantly portable than Animal Crossing. I’m really excited about a lot of games on the horizon- Ninetendogs, Electroplankton, Pac-Pix…all games that will use the touch screen fully, be fun to play on the go, and have a broad appeal. I think the sucess of Katamari Damachi is inspiring Nintendo to finally start bringing out some of their wackier games in the US. Nobody does wacky and Japanese as good as Nintendo. It’s a good market, and I think it’s one that is going to grow.
We are reaching a time when games have movie budgets without anywhere near the market that movies have. Something has go to give at some point, and I think Nintendo is recognizing that. We are reaching the point that the raw human code-writing power required to keep up with the best graphics and best systems is too expensive to make a profit off of, and certainly too expensive to take any risks with. Soon we will have a divide- between cookie-cutter sure-win games with the best technology and smaller, less-graphically intense (but perhaps more exquisitely designed) games with interesting gameplay. Nintendo and Sony are setting up their stakes. This is a bigger battle than just portable systems.
