Both Nintendo and Sony are set to hit back at the iPod Touch, the device which has taken the shine off their handheld gaming sales. Sony plans a new PSP and a PSP phone, while Nintendo today unveiled the launch details of its upcoming 3DS system which is 3D imagery on a DS device.
Sony is about to play the ace in its smartphone hand, a device which plays PlayStation games, along with a new PlayStation Portable. The world may not need a new PlayStation Portable, but Sony certainly needs a phone that leverages from its gaming brand.
The news was broken by Bloomberg which has spoken to Sony insiders and it said that the Sony announcement will be as soon as January 27th for the new PSP, and that the handset will arrive in February, so that would be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we imagine.
The big problem for both Sony and Nintendo is that there are now perfectly good gaming platforms, the iPod Touch and all Android devices being among them, which are not dedicated gaming platforms, so they can spread the cost of a platform purchase over two or three functions ‘ video viewing, gaming, app store platform or can provide it subsidized through a cellular operator, or both. Which is why we say that the world is probably not going to get too excited about a new PSP. Sure it needs one, for all those 62 million PSP lovers out there, but it’s never going to be as popular as a more general purpose device like the iPod Touch.
Now that’s probably a little unfair because the Sony PSP can act as a portable video player, an MP3 player and a gaming device ‘ but it LOOKS like it’s a purpose built gaming device – unless, of course, Sony changes the overall design, the look and feel, of its next generation PSP, it will only attract dedicated gamers. If it does change it, and makes it a companion product to the PS3 (as the current PSP is) then it can have games, videos and apps on the PS3 all available to the remote, WiFi connected device. That would in fact BE an iPod, but with a home based PS3 server. But if you add a phone to it, it becomes a must have device genuinely a market beater.
But the current spate of popular games are touch screen and accelerometer sensitive, so in our world it would need those too and yet in order to play PSP games it would still need the traditional Sony controllers. It could achieve this by putting a slider controller underneath a touch screen.
We wrote a stinging editorial a while back (18 months ago) saying that if there was not a PlayStation phone by Christmas (of 2009) then it would be too late, and in some respect it IS too late. A PlayStation phone back then would have really taken the wind out of the sales of the games in the Apple App Store and become a monster device in terms of volume and market control ‘ now it won’t. But it would be a device that would sell solidly, for a number of years, in the tens of millions. More was available to Sony had it moved earlier, but it is still worth doing as long as it does it right.
To play devil’s advocate, why doesn’t Sony also launch an application on the Apple App Store and on Android Market which allowed those devices to download and play PSP class games, as well as launch a Sony Ericsson device with PlayStation on it, but don’t hold your breath for that to happen. Apple certainly wouldn’t allow it and Sony would think it was giving the crown jewels away.
The next best thing is to offer Qriocity (the Sony online multimedia store) based music, video (and add Apps) on all of Sony’s devices, including connected TVs and Blu-ray players, the old PSP, the PS3, as well as all Sony Ericsson phones and also on these new devices.
There has been a lot of debate, for well over a year about whether a PSP replacement was worth bothering with, as Sony has lost out to Nintendo in handhelds and recently both have had trouble selling in the wake of the iPod Touch. Multi-platform devices like the Touch are more like ‘boredom’ averting devices than purely gaming devices, and that’s what’s the young crave ‘ with social networking, communications, media and casual gaming.
Nintendo has responded to this by taking its DS system towards 3D viewing and will sell the 3DS for $250 in the US and reckons it will have 30 games for the device by June. We think it will flop, but not too badly. Already there are leaks coming out of Japan, that 3D gaming on the device is accompanied by a form of ‘motion sickness.’ This is exactly what happened when virtual reality gaming was introduced two decades ago in Head Mounted Displays, and these also offered a form of 3D viewing. It usually stems from tiny mal-alignments in the two signals for the two eyes and on the 3DS tuning of these are under user control. A similar fate would deal a huge blow for Nintendo, until recently happily outselling all hand held devices which played games.
At the US launch in New York on Wednesday the company also stressed the device’s ability to show 3-D video without the need for glasses, and for it to function as a 3-D camera. It has one 3D screen and another touch screen (with stylus touch not gesture control) facing one another. The device hits US stores on March 27. 3D versions of Madden NFL, Street Fighter and Resident Evil were all on show at the Nintendo launch event.
If the 3D aspect is a flop, then consumers can turn it off, but that would mean that it would sell about as well as DS has recently and that’s not good enough for Nintendo to retain leadership of handhelds. The arrival of Tablet gaming has yet to make a real dent in portable gaming devices sales, but to us it looks a natural extension of the iPod Touch, but on around 200 new devices. So a traditional DS or PSP just won’t sell or more likely won’t reach out to any new audiences.
There are some other gimmicks which show Nintendo’s class as top of the pile in handheld games. The new 3DS offers crude facial recognition so that the 3D versions of Nintedogs + Cats lets your pet recognize you when it’s on the screen. The device also creates a ‘mini-me’ spelled Mii, an Avatar based around a 3D image taken by its camera.
In our view these two products are the last hurrah of the once great handheld gaming players, now unable to think outside the box. Only on a phone or tablet or something general purpose like an iPod Touch will handheld gaming survive and what is needed is a generic gaming platform executed in software, not a purely hardware based platform dedicated to games. So Sony really needs to make its ‘phone,’ a module that can drop into other handsets, probably purely as software, a kind of Sony games interpreter, and by rights it should be on an Android or Linux set of applications. It won’t happen, but it’s what should happen.