Almost exactly a year ago we put out the opinion that if one division or another of Sony did not put a PlayStation gaming cellular phone before Christmas it would be too late. Well the rumors are back almost exactly a year later and now there is talk about Sony putting a team together.
While we can still get excited about a cellphone that is also a handheld gaming device ‘ we think we called it right last year and already it’s too late. Sony has been arguing internally for too long to make this a game changer. If the thing was going to be with us by THIS Christmas, and if it was well integrated and would be an automatic replacement for the Sony PSP, we’d have hummed and ahhed ‘ maybe Sony can do something with this? But if the rumors are right and the executives quoted at Sony in a report from the Nikkei business daily ‘is planning on putting together a team next month,’ then the war is over and Sony never participated.
It has the feel of pure arrogance. If there was a rival out there, which already had several million devices head start, which had a revolutionary gaming interface in say touch screens, and already had built an App Store which had downloaded millions or even billions of downloads, no-one in their right mind would then ‘start’ preparations for a games battle.
We remember when Sony came into the games console market, all guns blazing with an underpowered, but well thought out strategy that no-one thought could muscle in on a territory owned by Nintendo and Atari. That’s right Atari? And companies which just shipped general purpose devices like Commodore. With the exception of Nintendo, which in the last generation of consoles had a near death experience, they are all gone.
But there isn’t one such rival, there are currently two, even three and at least one other building up a head of steam. Apple is a games dominated App Store, Nokia N-Gage, a failure at the device level is now part of the Ovi Store, and once Android picks up speed, its open source nature will mean there are suddenly 10,000 games which come out of nowhere. Even on Sony PlayNow Arena, the Sony Ericsson mobile portal (the clue is in the name) there is an internal rival to PlayStation.
But they aren’t even the main challengers. What every operator worth his salt does is to make sure that its home portal has enough Java games (and there is a whole submarket of low end aggregators and suppliers to operators here) so that most phone owners don’t need specialized games on their phones.
So it is arrogance to believe that coming last to the market, with no chance to make ANY mistakes, with a hatful of games, none of which can possibly work on the current de facto gaming interface for phones ‘ touch screens and tilting accelerometer devices.
So far all the pictures we have seen of this are mock ups which suggest that the old Sony PS2 style controllers form the basic look and feel of such a handset. If that were to happen, the phone would be laughable. The idea would be that a screen sits on an existing controller and somehow that’s it. That could hardly be called innovation now could it?
Walkman phones don’t look like Walkman MP3s with their click wheel, but they perform the same task, so that’s what we should be looking for.
What IS innovation are things like the Zeemote JS1 controller, which takes all the interface issues away from the handset for playing games, using it as a host for serving the game, like a console, which can either use its own screen or plug into a TV, and uses a Bluetooth controller, which comes with the phone, to drive the game.
In fact Sony should go out and buy Zeemote if it wants to get back into the innovation game, and stop coming last in every race it runs. But it would strangle innovation even there.
If it wanted to innovate for real, Sony should come up with a generic controller interface, which defaults to touch and accelerometer, but falls back to hot keys on phones which don’t have those features, and drive that as a standard for anyone that wants to put its games on phones. But we know that Sony won’t do that ‘ like Apple it is deeply proprietary in its thinking ‘ it wants to design games systems for its own devices, not design a gaming architecture for everyone else.
The other areas where it might innovate is in the new world of online tournament play, multiplayer role playing games that use GPS location, such as treasure hunting with phones, as well as the overall interface.
In handsets right now whatever the question, the answer is open systems, the same as it was in PCs and computer servers 20 years ago, and Sony thinks an open system is one where you peek out of the locked door to decide if you let people in, and charge them on the way in too.
The new, impressive PSP Go is already set for an October delivery and is very much seen as a way to revitalize its efforts in handheld gaming devices. What Sony could do is throw a cellular chip at that, and get operators to offer a flat data contract for downloading games and for IP voice. It would be so much cheaper than inventing a PlayStation phone which is only going to be a retrograde disaster.