Doom has been called on current generation consoles many times in the past few years. The Wii was doomed when it was first announced, the PS3 was doomed when its price tag was revealed, the Xbox 360 was doomed when the PS3 began to outsell it, and the doom changed hands between the high-definition consoles thereafter. Rarely is doom called, however, on a handheld, especially one which is unreleased, but this hasn’t prevented quite a few people, including esteemed analyst Michael Pachter, from predicting that Sony’s next handheld will be destroyed by the 3DS.
The Nintendo DS has already sold a mind-boggling 145 million units, and the PSP has managed a respectable 65 million. Both are selling very well indeed, but there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that, in the sales battle, the Nintendo DS is the clear winner and, indeed, the best-selling console of all time. But this is the past, and what’s done is done. The future of handheld gaming, iPhone and Android aside (as they are technically phones rather than consoles), is the Nintendo 3DS, and Sony’s yet-to-be-revealed-or-even-confirmed (despite the fact that everyone already knows) second PSP system, hereafter referred to as the PSP2 for simplicity’s sake.
The 3DS was announced to enormous fanfare at last year’s E3 conference, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t find the system at worst, interesting and innovative, and at best, perhaps the greatest handheld ever and a masterpiece of design. It has enormous amounts of Nintendo first-party support (including some franchises not seen for years such as Kid Icarus) as well as third-party support, with some old favourites, such as Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil and Kingdom Hearts, being released on the console with 3D support. And that’s just what’s been announced so far. On top of that, you have fantastic hardware, including an analog stick for the first time on a Nintendo handheld, and dual CPUs, a 133MHz GPU and 64MB RAM. Some say the games already look as good as Wii games, but in 3D.
Perhaps the only slight drawback, if you can call it that, is a relatively high price point of US$300 (rumoured, but the Japanese price of 25,000 yen is equal to just slightly more than this). To compare, the original Nintendo DS launched at $150, or half the price. The DS Lite, the DS’ bestselling model, launched at just $130. The PSP cost considerably more, at $250, and this led to weak early sales despite a very strong opening.
We don’t know a whole lot about the PSP2, other than the fact that it exists (and it definitely exists, is in developers’ hands, and has a first-generation development kit ready). There’s a fair bit that we’re pretty sure we know, though. Firstly, it does not support 3D, or if it does, it’s a very well-hidden secret (bear in mind that we’re discussing Sony here). Secondly, it has dual analog sticks, which means no more shooters in which you aim with the face buttons. Thirdly, there is a touch-sensitive trackpad on the back. Fourthly, it is allegedly as powerful as the PS3. Fifthly, it has a high-definition screen and twice the RAM of an Xbox 360 (giving it a whopping gigabyte of RAM). So, firstly, any allegations that the PSP2 will be weaker than the 3DS are…questionable.
What we definitely don’t know, and cannot even really guess, is the system’s price tag. There’s clearly some pretty serious hardware in there. On top of this, the price of the PSP-Go, which was really just a PSP-3000 with a nice sliding screen, some flash storage and no UMD drive, was $80 higher than the 3000, and thus very few bought it. Sony later tried to rationalise this by stating that they never expected anyone to buy it, or some such thing. Fortunately, the PSP2 does have a “media format”, so that fear can disappear as well.
We also don’t know much about the system’s game line-up, but it should get a fair bit of first party support, since there are a few Sony Computer Entertainment studios, including Sony Bend and Titan Studios, that haven’t been doing anything much for a while. The developers of the new Mortal Kombat game have their hands on at least one developer kit and actually seem to like it, which suggests that quite a few third-party studios would have seen and used the system. Besides, no Sony console has ever really had a problem with game line-up for very long. Where the problem exists to begin with (such as with the PS3), it is remedied soon afterwards.
Think of the last console that actually met doom. Arguably, the DreamCast. The successor to a console which had already performed badly. A console in a market with three other consoles, following a full generation of Sony dominance (no, the DS did not dominate the PSP to anywhere near the extent that the PlayStation dominated the Saturn and N64). These are the conditions in which doom can possibly take place. As I stated in my introduction, pretty much every console of the last decade has been “doomed” at one point or another, often more than once, and has recovered almost every time.
Back to the PSP2 specifically, we really don’t know enough about it to be prophesising. It’s true that it probably won’t sell as much as the 3DS, but does that really matter in the grand scheme of things? Nintendo’s next handheld will almost certainly cross the border into nine-figure territory, but surely even 50 million sales is perfectly respectable for any system, bearing in mind that only nine systems have ever passed this mark, and that no non-Nintendo handheld, other than the PSP, has ever sold over 11 million units? In fact, to cross the 50 million mark, the PSP2 would have outsold the Super Nintendo, arguably the greatest console in history.
The PSP2 is set to be officially announced on 27th January. If it is revealed that the system will retail for $999 and will feature only Imagine: Gerbilz and Pixeljunk Racers 2 as launch titles, I will be happy to join the “PSP2 is doomed!” bandwagon. Until then, however, we should at least give the thing a chance. You never know, it could even have four dimensions.
Source:http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/83535/the-psp2-is-not-doomed/
