John Koller, director of hardware marketing at Sony wants to make the PSP a formidable force in the handheld market and admitted that the PSP wasn’t doing as well as he wanted it to.
But Koller says things are on the upswing for Sony’s little machine. "18 months ago PSP hardware wasn’t doing quite as well in terms of sales. Since then, it’s taken off. We’ve been talking to a lot of developers and really trying to change their thinking about how PSP is doing and they’ve realized it from what they’ve seen at retail."
One of the things Sony wants to change is the content for the PSP. Many titles were just ports of its bigger console cousins. "…the games [developers] were creating were mostly ports and a lot of consumers were playing it at home and saying ‘well, I could play it on a screen like this or I could play it on a smaller screen.’ We don’t want to have that competition."
Koller sees the whole solution to driving sales for the PSP as better software. "Going towards the end of the year and going into 09 and beyond, we’re going to see a lot of very large franchise games come from third-parties. They’re going to be a bit of a surprise, they’re going to be like ‘Wow, that’s coming to PSP?’"
Present figures for units sold for the PSP is 37 million compared to 77.54 million Nintendo DS machines sold.
As far as high tech looks, most will agree that the PSP is the winner. But PSP owners grumble about the lack of good games for the handheld. Koller’s mission to turn out more quality games is a good one and once again shows that the industry adage that software sells hardware is still true.
[via MTVgames]
