PlayStation Home Coming To PSP?

And what about Remote (game)Play, while we're at it?

Posted by Staff
PlayStation Home Coming To PSP?
The head of marketing for Sony's American PlayStation division, John Koller, has hinted that we may see Home head to the PSP.

Speaking to MTV news, Koller said, "Intuitively, if you take the PSP with you, you would want to take some of Home with you".

Koller did add that no concrete plans have been made yet. The question remains, however: is this a long-term goal for Sony, or Koller-as-Sony-fanboy letting his mouth run away with him?

SPOnG spoke to Sony to find out if Home will be finding its way onto the PSP and was met with a "No comment". In spite of that, it seems likely that Sony is at least considering some sort of application of Home to the PSP, if based on no other reasoning than, as Koller suggested, it makes darned good sense.

The phrase "some of" looms large in Koller's comments. It's unclear what form Home would take on the PSP should it ever leave the living room.

Koller also teased that Sony is toying with adding gaming functionality to the PSP/PS3 Remote Play feature. "It's something that's being looked at," he said. "We certainly would be interested [in doing that with] a PSN kind of game. It wouldn't be a Blu-ray disc kind of game, a large game. That would be very difficult. ... If that could be implemented, that could be great".

Koller did acknowledge the greatest problem facing gaming Remote Play: lag time. Currently, the only thing like a game playable from the PS3 via the PSP is free Japanese PS3 download, Mainichi Issyo, which features only limited interactivity.

Source: MTV News
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Comments

Joji 7 Aug 2007 11:22
1/4
Home! I think they should concentrate on giving people homebrew options, more than freaking Home. Home won't make any difference unless your PSP is online or wi-fi. In an incentive to get people online it might work if done properly. If you have to be around your PS3 to do it though, there's not much point.

Sony, trying tuning into your customers needs, instead of ignoring them and doing what you think they want. Muppets!
tyrion 7 Aug 2007 11:44
2/4
Joji wrote:
Sony, trying tuning into your customers needs, instead of ignoring them and doing what you think they want. Muppets!

Sony, try tuning into uninformed rants in Internet forums instead of only doing what is technically and contractually possible within the bounds of your business. Muppets!
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Joji 7 Aug 2007 12:15
3/4
Lol. Oh, you take my 'Muppets' bit too seriously. That's my sense of humour, perhaps I should have added a lol in there.

It's all very well, you picking that bit out Tyrion, but missing and not replying to my main point. Its been clear from day one, that user want homebrew official options, but Sony still fail to build on that desire of users, and doing so push their activities into a fight, via their PSP updates. Yet, its odd they find time to plug Home again, when the PSP interface is fine anyway.

Is it so hard to give PSP users some kind of legal homebrew offering? I don't think so. If MS can do it with Live and XNA, its only fair PSP should get creative options if they are wanted too.
tyrion 7 Aug 2007 16:19
4/4
Joji wrote:
It's all very well, you picking that bit out Tyrion, but missing and not replying to my main point. Its been clear from day one, that user want homebrew official options, but Sony still fail to build on that desire of users, and doing so push their activities into a fight, via their PSP updates. Yet, its odd they find time to plug Home again, when the PSP interface is fine anyway.

Do you want me to reiterate the points I've made before? OK then, here we go.

It's been clear from day one that the usual hackers and homebrew community have had their ranks bolstered by a small number of vocal games players who found the PSP's software library lacking in the first year or so. However, given that Dark Alex has now quit the scene, don't you think that the interest is waning back to the normal hardcore who would hack their toasters to get MAME running on it?

When was the last time you saw a "PSP firmware X downgraded" story on Digg?

Of the 22.28M (source VGChartz) how many do you really think have custom firmware and run homebrew, emulation or just plain pirated software? A few thousand? Maybe a couple of hundred thousand? It would take 222,800 to get to 1%, which would still be insignificant.

Joji wrote:
Is it so hard to give PSP users some kind of legal homebrew offering? I don't think so. If MS can do it with Live and XNA, its only fair PSP should get creative options if they are wanted too.

I would have thought it was technically very simple. The problems are the licensing costs and the risk of piracy.

If Sony put out a "homebrew" kit, with all the appropriate signing technology to let applications, games, etc run off memory stick then the first thing it would be used for would be to port MAME. That would then open Sony up for lawsuits from arcade manufacturers and other console developers because they had just condoned piracy on the PSP platform.

The next thing that would happen is that all the small devs would use the homebrew kit to develop their games and then sell them online. This is because they would not have to pay licensing costs to Sony. Meaning Sony is deprived of income and retail is deprived of footfall. Again with the lawsuits.

The only other way to handle it would be to sell a special PSP for developing that couldn't play regular games. Then the dev kit would produce apps that normal PSPs wouldn't be bale to run, then Sony would require all apps to be submitted to a PSPStore where they would vet and sign them and normal PSPs would have to download the apps in order to use them. That would put the cost of the dev kit up and put technological barriers in the way that the next Dark Alex would get round and you'd be no better off than now.

Remember Microsoft charge a membership fee for access to the 360 dev libraries for use in XNA Studio and require a submission process to get games into other people's hands. That's why Live Arcade isn't swimming with SNES emulators and web browsers right now.

Unless I've not thought it through enough and should have just shouted "is it can be hoembroo tiem now?" at the top of my lungs? <- That was intended as humour! :-)
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