Mobile Home for PSP??? News
Gwynne Dixon
07/08/2007
SCEA's Head of Marketing reveals plans for the PSP...
Sony Computer Entertainment America's Head of Marketing, John Koller, has revealed in an interview with MTV that the possibility of integrating the PlayStation Network's online Home with the PSP, has been part of development plans at Sony.
Koller stated that: "Intuitively, if you take the PSP with you, you would want to take some of Home with you." Sony's Home online community for PS3 is currently being BETA tested and is projected for release this Autumn.
Koller also revealed that Sony engineers in Tokyo had been looking into the possibility of being able to access, by utilising the PSP's remote play feature, saved games on the PS3 via Wi-Fi connection.
However, Koller added that lag-time was a considerable stumbling block with these plans: "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."
As far as Sony's plan for an online store of videos, music and games accessible via a PSP is concerned, Koller pointed out that its rollout depended on digital rights management issues that were being sorted out in the Home Office in Tokyo. He suggested that these problems should reach a conclusion in six to eight months.
There were also explanations as to why certain features for the PSP, that were expected to be unveiled during E3, never came to fruition. The dual analogue stick was deemed to be unworkable on the new slimmer PSPs, as older games using one stick wouldn't translate well to the dual stick format, and newer dual stick games would also cause problems for older PSPs: "We certainly looked at the area below the [face buttons on the right side of the PSP] for a second analog stick, but we thought the issues far outweighed the benefit we'd get out of it."
Additionally, Koller explained that there wouldn't be a PSP TV tuner available in America similar to the one announced in Japan. The reason for this is that the signal costs over-the-air were too expensive.