Another major announcement by Sony at Gamescom was the company's plan to introduce PSP Minis, which are smaller, bite-sized games for the portable console. Comparisons of course have been made between iPhone and PSP Go for some time, and the addition of cheaper games only reinforces that idea, but Lempel still doesn't look at it as a way to counter Apple's ubiquitous device. “We kind of see these games as a third tier in our offering,” he said. “So if you have the first tier, which are full blown UMD games, and then you've got some of the PSN original titles, and then this brings another tier. It adds even more value to the device and appeals to a wider range of users. The games are smaller, so you can download them fast, and they're less expensive. And they're just different, so it allows us to get a lot of developers on board. And we've already significantly reduced the cost of dev tools on PSP, so with the new prices we can get a lot of these smaller developers on the platform to make some great stuff you could only find on PSP. It's a cool initiative for us.”
With that in mind, we asked Lempel is Sony is directly courting iPhone games developers to either port their titles to PSP Go or start developing new games for the platform. Ultimately, though, Sony is looking at “anyone who is interested.” Lempel continued, “It could be people who made items for iPhone, it could be guys who have unique ideas for PSP... and again, PSP has all the unique controls and buttons for games, so there might be other things people could do with it. But we're just open to looking at a lot of different content for this. It truly is a departure from how we normally develop content. It's a little bit of an experiment but very exciting because I think we'll see some great stuff.”
With PSP Go's launch getting closer and closer, we asked Lempel what kind of feedback Sony's been getting from its publishing and retail partners. He noted that “there's a ton of renewed interest in PSP with the Go coming out,” adding, “People think it's a great direction to take... and some thought maybe we should have done this a little bit sooner because they think it just makes sense for a portable device.”
