Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Reviewers are giving the Go some serious flak for what isn’t a surprise: the fact that you can’t use UMDs in it. This seems to be the number one crucial failing of the new handheld and it’s a deliberate design decision. ArsTechnica spells it out clearly, bashing the Go as a pro-Sony and anti-consumer device with a price point that’s “almost a sick joke” in this recession. It’s all about having one seller with no price competition from retail.

Hm, let me think, what else raised this kind of torch-and-pitchfork no-retail-competition gamer rage in the past? What was it? I’m having a hard time remembering now since everyone has since gone back to their homes and stoped raging against it since it’s considered a success. Oh yeah, it’s Steam!

Now do I wish the PSP Go had UMD support? Of course I do. Do I think the Go is a good choice for consumers? Not yet, and it probably won’t be for a while. We didn’t really see Steam start kicking off sales of games via frequent discounts of one kind or another until relatively recently, so I don’t quite know when the PlayStation Store will be something to gaze longingly at.

My guess is that Sony will wait out the fire and brimstone and put the PSP Go out in front of the digital distribution revolution that everyone thinks has “saved PC gaming”. Are they ahead of the curve? I’m sure they are, and it might be as big a risk as the PS3′s Blu-ray drive was, but this time Sony doesn’t have a high definition format to be victorious to fall back on.

What they do have to fall back on is that gamers — hardcore gamers that buy things like a PSP in the first place — are used to buying digital content. They’ve done it on their Wii, PS3, 360, a PSP, or even that other itty bitty digital distribution market you might have heard of called iTunes. So all Sony has to do is wait, push the digital content to all PSPs, not just the Go, and watch adoption rates climb.

It’s entirely possible the consumer isn’t ready for an all-digital gaming platform, but you know what, I’m going to bet that isn’t the case. People are already buying things like Warhawk and Burnout Paradise on the PS3 because they just don’t feel like getting up to put the disc in the drive and want to jump right in, so those gamers are being spoken to by the new PlayStation Store.

I just hope we more quickly get to the part of the story where we can get sale pricing from time to time as well as always be able to find older releases there. Until then I’ll deal with the little whirring disc in my PSP-2000.

Sources: image.