Game Stooge

EDITORIAL: Too Few PSP Games Coming

• Scribbled on April 17th, 2009 by Jordan Lund
• Filed in Editorial Content, Sony PSP

Sony’s John Koller sat down with industry news site GamesIndustry.biz for the first interview since the news broke of the UMD-less PSP game Patapon 2.

I’m going to go off on a bit of a rant, because I’m a PSP fanboy. I bought my 1000 unit on day of release and kept it in a pristine 1.5 firmware status for all the homebrew stuff that’s out there, then bought a 2000 to keep up to date for the games. Now that that screen has gone wonky on me (weird vertical line down the center), I’m actually in the market for a 3rd PSP.

2008 might have been a great year for game sales on the PSP, but it was a terrible year for game releases. There were just 93 titles released on the PSP in all of 2008, fewer than any other machine, fewer than in any other year since the PSP came out. Even the PlayStation 2 had 151 games come out for it that year. The Nintendo DS, by comparison, had 347 in 2008.

So when Koller says “There’s a lot of software coming. We’re really focused on software, and I don’t think that’s a big surprise given that it’s going to be the best software year the PSP has ever had, there’s no doubt”, someone needs to remind him that for the first quarter of 2009 there have only been 13 PSP games released. This compares to 56 DS titles.

Right now, they’re on track to only have 52 games out this year. Yes, I know, I want LittleBigPlanet too, but when the number of titles constantly shrinks year after year, that’s not a sign of a platform that’s going to live much longer. ToTheGame.com, a site devoted to release dates, shows just 28 PSP titles as being “upcoming” in 2009. A further 33 are shown with a date of “TBA”; perhaps they’ll be out this year, perhaps they won’t.

So, the best case scenario is the 13 games that are already out, the 28 that are dated, and the 33 that are “TBA”, that’s still just potential total of 74 games this year. I fail to see how 2009 is going to be “the best year ever!” with those kinds of numbers.

Back in January, Sony crowed quite loudly about selling 50 million PSPs worldwide. No, not as impressive as the 100 million DSs that are out there, but still more than Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 COMBINED at the time. Is this how you treat 50 million potential customers? 13 games? Really?