Changing the game, PlayStation goes mobile
PlayStation Portable can play full-length films, home videos, photos and music. Will it score with new audiences?
Some traveled to Japan, where they were released in December, to buy one. Others paid resellers premium prices--sometimes more than twice their $250 retail price--to call them their own before their arrival in stores in North America in two weeks.
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The object of desire is Sony's PlayStation Portable, a handheld video game device aimed at redefining entertainment on the go--and not just for young gamers.
For Sony, which has faltered in recent years in some electronics categories it once dominated, it is a big bet. The company often refers to the PlayStation Portable, the descendant of the original PlayStation, born 10 years ago, as the first truly integrated portable entertainment system.
Besides playing a new class of interactive 3D games on its 4.3-inch LCD, the PlayStation Portable can play full-length movies, music videos and home movies and display digital snapshots with startling clarity.
With the tap of a couple of well-placed buttons, the device is a high-fidelity digital music player complete with gleaming white ear buds.
"It is just the sexiest device I've seen since the iPod," said Sean Spector, a vice president and founder of GameFly, an online video-game-rental service. Citing its "beautiful industrial design," he added, "What the iPod did for music, this could do for electronic games."
The device's imminent arrival is a leading topic of conversation this week in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference, an annual industry event. More than 100 game developers and publishers, large and small, from Electronic Arts to Planet Moon Studios, are planning to make special content for the device. Sony promises that 24 games, most of them $40 to $50, will be ready when the PlayStation Portable goes on sale March 24 with 1 million devices available to retailers that day.
A lot of PlayStation 2 franchises with PlayStation Portable twists are ready to go, like Sony's "Twisted Metal: Head On," Konami's "Metal Gear Acid" and Activision's "Tony Hawk's Underground 2 Remix," developers say.
"We took the original Underground game and added a bunch of new levels," said Kathy Vrabeck, president of Activision Publishing. "And we added wireless capabilities."
Warren Wall of Electronic Arts said the company quickly realized the potential of the device, and two years ago created a 200-member group called Team Fusion, which he leads in Vancouver, British Columbia, to develop games exclusively for the new Sony device. He said Electronic Arts would offer five new titles at the outset. All the games, he said, have been painstakingly reworked to take advantage of the device's PlayStation-like controls and its screen--capable of 16.7 million colors--which he described as amazingly brilliant.
"We had to create a new visual language," Wall said of the process.
David Cole, president of DFC Intelligence, a research company in San Diego that focuses on interactive entertainment, said that with the new device Sony was clearly hoping to lock in an older consumer than the typical teenage and young-adult gamer.
His company forecasts the portable gaming market will expand to an estimated $11.1 billion in 2007 from $4 billion last year.
"Perhaps PSP can create that new market," he said. "It has been an underserved segment that will be a big growth segment." In other words, he said, Sony could create an avenue to make portable gaming mainstream in the same way the company made console gaming mainstream with the first PlayStation.
Cole said it was difficult to entice someone who had never played a video game to start when they are in their mid-20s. But today's market
is brimming with gamers 25 and older who have been playing on computers or home-based consoles most of their lives, and want to continue to play as they grow older.Nintendo, the industry leader with its line of Game Boy portable gaming devices, has long appealed to younger players, Cole said. Even the silvery dual-screen Nintendo DS, which came out late last year, has not attracted hordes of adult players, he said, adding that most adults shy away from portables.
Sony has not been shy about its desire to appeal first to consumers 18 to 34 years old, and then to younger teenagers and children. In recent months the company has promoted the device's nongaming extras with almost as much fervor as its high-end gaming features, like built-in Wi-Fi for online gaming at Wi-Fi hot spots and wireless ad hoc gaming with anyone within 100 feet.
"We definitely see it as a transcendent device," said Andrew House, an executive vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment America, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment, which is most responsible for the device. "There are so many arms and legs to this. One of the key issues to me is that for the first time a gaming device carries storage media on board that interacts with other devices."
What House is referring to is Sony's Memory Stick, a sliver of solid-state memory that can be slipped out of a Sony camcorder, for instance, and into the PlayStation Portable, which can then play whatever was recorded by the camcorder. The device is sold with a 32-megabyte Memory Stick Duo, which also functions as a place to store game information, like preferences, downloaded updates like new tracks and vehicles, and the last level obtained.
The device also features a USB 2.0 port, which, in combination with its Memory Stick, permits the device to act--whether connected to a PC or to a machine from Apple Computer--like a portable hard drive. So any digital file, including ones for music (MP3 or Atrac format) and pictures, can be dragged and dropped and stored on the device's Memory Stick.
Critically important, House noted, is that the device also reads data from a new type of high-capacity optical disc called a Universal Media Disc, or UMD. The disc, encased in a plastic sleeve similar in size and design to Sony's MiniDisc, can store up to 1.8 gigabytes of information. Games and full-length movies are sold on UMDs, which are not recordable in the PlayStation Portable, Sony executives emphasized.
The first million PlayStation Portables sold in North America will include a UMD of the film "Spider-Man 2," released last year by Sony Pictures Entertainment. In fact, House said, the first five movies released for the device will be from Sony Pictures.
Steve Beeks, president of Lions Gate Entertainment, said his company was preparing to release at least a dozen of its films on UMD to play on the device. The first are expected to be in stores in early June, he said.
"We happened to have a library of films that tend to do very well with each evolution of new technologies," he said, specifically referring to the Lions Gate science-fiction movie "Terminator 2," which has been a favorite among young men.
Beeks said he was also committed to releasing several movies for the PlayStation Portable next year at prices similar to what movies on DVD cost.
Richard Doherty, research director of the Envisioneering Group, a technology assessment and market research company in Seaford, N.Y., said he was impressed with Sony's approach to the device.
"It's like getting another system free," he said of the device's multiple uses. "When you hold it up at arm's length, it has a better picture quality than a 27-inch television screen seen across the room."
While the device's ability to play movies is a selling point (and demanding on its lithium-ion battery), Cole of DFC Intelligence questions whether it is enough, along with other nongame extras, to sway consumers to pay $250 for the system.
"That's a fairly high price, $100 more than the competition," Cole said of the price of the PlayStation Portable compared with that of the Nintendo DS. "I don't think it's going to come down to who plays movies. It's who's got the coolest games."
And that contest, Cole and other video game analysts and developers said, would most likely come in the fall when the holiday shopping season warms up.
Aaron Loeb, a producer at Planet Moon, which now makes games only for the PlayStation Portable, said he wanted to be a part of the coming game battles. He said that after he first saw the device, last May, he concluded that it was what he called a transformative device.
In two weeks Sony will get a better idea of how much it can transform.
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