Sony: UMD Is Here To Stay

The PSP's senior marketing manager, John Koller, has said that UMD is going to remain a staple of Sony's handheld.

Speaking about the future of UMD, Koller said, "We'll never walk away from our base. Whether it's movies or game content, third parties have an incredible opportunity to utilize it... The future of UMD is bright."

This comes just two days after SPOnG told you about information uncovered in the latest PSP update that suggests the death of UMD. Doth the marketing manager protest too much?

Koller also had a few words to say about how UMD stacks up against Nintendo's handheld content delivery system, the old-fashioned cartridge. "Duplication of UMDs is much easier, cheaper than cartridges," Koller said. "We've really optimized time and cost by going with a disc-based format."

He was, however, refreshingly frank about the format's limitations."The slowness of the seeking speed of UMD is a weakness," he said. "The [...] loading speed becomes a big problem for UMD."

Koller placed more emphasis on UMD for its movie-playing functionality than on gaming, however. "The future of movies on UMD is great," he said. "We saw a 35 per cent growth year-on-year from 2005 to 2006, which clearly demonstrates a growing interest by consumers for UMD movies."

Be it movies or games, however, the future of UMD looks rocky to say the least. The PSP is the only device to use the format, making porting of games to the system awkward and release of movies unappealing.

SPOnG also recalls that in January 2006, Nintendo UK's general manager, David Yarnton, said of the DS's transformation to the DS Lite, “We haven't got any plans at the moment” the very day before the DS Lite was announced. It gives us the sneaking suspicion that corporate right hands might not always know what their left hands are doing.

^{Source: Pocketgamer}