Malik  (6/30/04)

PSP Delays Being Predicted 

From a recent article at Gamespot.com, some news on the future of the PSP is coming out...well, not from Sony but rather from a game industry analyst. According to PJ McNealy, the game industry analyst in question, the PSP may be delayed beyond the previously expected March 2005 release timeframe. The reasons they give are, more or less, two-fold. 

On one hand, you have the fact that the specs and all that fun stuff has not been sent out to the potential content developers yet. This mean that there may not be any UMD movies or music disks available at launch. In turn, this could have (my opinion here) a similar affect on the PSP as it did on the PS2. For those who don't remember the PS2 release, it was plagued with two problems; not enough of the console was available (so only a few dozen people would get it in each market...I was one of them, hehehe), and more importantly, for those who had the console, there were no quality titles for it. This lack of titles being available could serve to further tarnish Sony's record with system launches. 

On the other hand, it seems that there may be some internal issues at Sony in regard to the PSP. This is all a bunch of business mumbo-jumbo, so I won't bore you here (if you want, click the link to Gamespot's article). Needless to say, this isn't too big of a shock to me since Sony, like any big corporation that handles far too many product lines to even being to list, is bound to have some internal strife from time to time. 

While it's being guessed that the PSP will be delayed, I am hoping Sony is smart enough to push things forward with increased gusto. While Sony and Nintendo both argue that their new portables are not competition for each other, they are. And with every lost step that either company makes, the gaming world will feel it ten-fold as the competition becomes ugly and chaotic...plus, I like things to meet their expected release dates...after dealing with Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Fable, Star Ocean 3 and all the other delayed crap in the last year, I just want something to come out on time for once...I'm not asking all that much...

Malik