The Sound of One Handheld Clapping
The 2007 GDC saw lots of platforms get announcements and new media attention through developer and publisher presentations. You had Epic’s slideshow on iterative development with Gears of War, a Spore developer spewing bile at the Wii, Sony’s demos of PlayStation Home and LittleBigWorld, and a look at some two-player fun for Phantom Hourglass on the DS. There was one system that was basically ignored, even by its corporate parent, and that is the PSP.
PocketGamer sounded the alarm for me at least, noticing that Sony said nothing about the handheld in their keynote. This was an opportunity announce innovative uses of the PSP in PS3 games, hey perhaps even talk about a PSP camera or GPS coming to the US, why not use that camera to snap a picture and put it in PlayStation Home. The possibilities excite the imagination, but we’re the only ones coming up with them because there was nothing coming from Sony. Nothing said at a developer conference.
PSPFanboy picked up on the silence as well, commenting that the only place the PSP seemed to show up was as a virtual device inside of the PlayStation Home demo. They even go so far as to say that it proves that Sony doesn’t care about the PSP. Harsh and bitter words from a PSP fan site to be sure, but I can’t blame them.
Are they reading too much into this? It could be that Sony wanted to focus tightly on the PS3 to reassure the marketplace that it was serious about online play and new franchise innovations like LittleBigWorld. It could be that Sony wants to unleash a bevy of PSP news outside of this event, to not dilute the message. But with nothing said, not even a “wait until next week” notice about a future press event, I have to wonder if Sony itself considers the PSP something not even worth supporting.
There is one reason to keep hope. The last time there was this much hand-wringing over something important that Sony was saying absolutely nothing about, it was over Sony’s silence on its online service plans.
-
jimminy cricket
