Filed under: Interviews
The state of PSP is rather confusing at the moment. On one hand, it is meeting extraordinary sales in Japan, being the top selling system in the territory for the last few months. On the other hand, disparaging software sales in the West have caused major publishers and developers to speak against the platform. New Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida talked with GI.biz, and although he admits shortcomings, is confident about the platform.
"It's too early to make judgments," Yoshida says about the three year old handheld. "We know there's a lot more that we can do, and with the massive growth of the industry we understand that third party publishers have so many choices, many more than they have resources. Sometimes we struggle to convince them to put more resources into the PSP."Yoshida views the DS not as PSP's rival, but as a different kind of product altogether (not unlike comparisons between the PS3 and Wii). "We've always thought that the PSP as a platform is standing on its own - there's no direct competition, although some people think that the DS is its rival simply because it's portable, but the positioning and the main user base are totally different."
While Sony may be struggling to convince third parties to work on PSP, Yoshida promises continued support for the handheld. "So we continue to support the platform, and we've been doing really well with first party software, and I hope that more developers and publishers see some of the things that the PSP can uniquely offer to them, and its reach into consumers' lives." See the full interview here.
