The PSP business has certainly had its ups and downs, and the PSPgo apparently confused consumers with its price point and lack of UMD compatibility. While SCEA's Rob Dyer recently told us that Sony's got some major plans for the PSP this year with some "big, big titles," Codemasters is clearly not convinced.
Speaking to Edge, Gavin Cheshire, vice president of Codemasters Studios, had some very harsh words for the portable gaming platform. "Well, speaking as a person who bought a PSP, the problem was that I always thought, because it was a better screen than iPod's, that I'd be doing more with it. But it was such a bollocking useless waste of space; just getting stuff on it was ridiculous. That was its downfall," he said.
Cheshire added that the user experience just isn't good enough on PSP, especially when compared to something like iPod Touch or iPhone. “Relatively speaking, we didn’t do too badly on F1 PSP. But regarding the future, I think they’ve got – well… no. PSP Go’s a lovely device, really smart, but our senior VP bought one the day it came out and has a great story, because he ended up on some customer support line just trying to do basic stuff. He had to re-download his software, do an immediate firmware update, and that’s your user experience. Sony just hasn’t got it right. Stuff like that will make people leave it alone,” he noted.
The PSP's user experience may not be that elegant, but Sony continues to upgrade both the PS3 and PSP through firmware updates. The bigger problem Sony's been facing with PSP is that the software sales have been utterly plagued by piracy. Rob Dyer told us that Sony's been working on solutions for that and hopes to have a solid answer soon.
