Microsoft's Bach Tells PSP Tales

Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment and Devices Group at Microsoft, reckons there's a lesson to be learned from Sony's PlayStation Portable. Let's see what the Zune maker can teach or learn from this lesson.

Speaking in an interview about the Zune, Microsoft’s music-player and Microsoft’s most likely approach to handheld gaming, Bach said, “The PSP is a reasonably successful product at the profit-and-loss level. But as a product concept, there are cautionary tales to learn from it.

“While it is good at producing audio, it’s not a good music player because it doesn’t have local storage (except for flash memory slots). You can’t keep your music there. It has a beautiful screen, but you can only get the video under the Universal Media Disc format. That format hasn’t been successful. On a game level, it has done well. But even there, it is mostly PlayStation 2 ports. There isn’t much original content. When you do these devices, they can’t be pretty good at a lot of things. They need to be great at what they do.”

Going on to talk about the future of games on the Zune, Bach said, “you aren’t going to see a broad gaming effort from us until we sort that through and have it figured out. I don’t think of Zune like the PSP. The PSP is a game player that also does video and music. We think of Zune as a broad-based entertainment device.”

So, exactly how great does Bach think the Zune is as a platform for games? “From a gaming perspective, it is reasonably well suited”, he said. Crikey, Robbie! Put that enthusiasm away! How is it standing up as a "product at the profit-and-loss level" though?

^{Source: Venture Beat}