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PSP Go
The arrival of Sony’s update to the PlayStation Portable, the PSP Go, gives potential buyers more to ponder than its $250 price tag and the fact it excludes a UMD drive, which means many consumers will now download their games from the PlayStation Store.
In areas where broadband service is loaded down with Internet Overcharging schemes like usage allowances and overlimit fees, the first question for potential PSP Go owners is, “how big are these games?”
They are right to be concerned… and confused. There has been considerable debate over the size of the average PSP Go game. Some retailers have been talking about Go games running 50-100 megabytes.
But Al De Leon, PR Manager for Sony Computer Entertainment America, has stated the average size of a PSP Go downloadable game will be between 600-800 megabytes and no upper limit has yet been announced. A few consumers who purchased the device discovered “no upper limit” is the operative phrase. They found some examples among PSP titles on offer:
- Gran Turismo is 937 megabytes
- God of War: Chains of Olympus is 1.29 gigabytes
- Resistance: Retribution is 1.4 gigabytes
Of course, some games will be much smaller, especially those designed for playing on the Go.
Sony’s experiments with online game distribution could foretell a future where game titles are increasingly distributed online to consumers, which reduces manufacturing costs and speeds delivery to eager buyers. But that future may be hampered if broadband providers implement usage allowances, particularly at the lower limits some companies have experimented with. Frontier’s infamous 5 gigabyte, unenforced limit in their Acceptable Use Policy is a good example.
Other stories of interest:
- Limbo Dance Redux: Bell Canada Lowers Usage Allowances on Customers, But Sells Usage Insurance for “Peace of Mind”
- Cox Increases Usage Cap Allowances, Rarely Enforced Anyway; Exempts Cox ‘Digital Telephone Service’
- Frontier Reveals Plans of Usage Cap Implementation to Employees; Leaves Customers In The Dark Until It’s A Done Deal
- Time-Warner Road Runner Service’s Usage Cap Test: 5-40GB Per Month
- Cable ONE: Turning Broadband Service Into a Math Problem
Right now I have the first version of the Sony PSP. Sony did enable the Sony Store recently for my PSP via a firmware update, and it does give me the ability to download games. I might mention, the PSP Go, unlike the original PSP and the PSP Slim does not accept UMDs, so it’s memory card and Internet for you. And just like OnLive, the PSP Go will be hurt by Internet capping, and for that matter any gamer who is deep into their hobby like me.
I am told the memory card is proprietary, or at least the way it is formatted? I admit I am not a gamer and don’t follow the industry very closely, but this group will be among those hurt badly by punitive usage caps.
The memory card on which device? On the PSPs, you can use pretty much any SD card in it and it uses the standard FAT file system. On the new PSP Go however, I didn’t hear anything about what the internal memory card has on it, but I assume it might be running something like FAT32 or from what I have heard, a custom file system built around FAT.
With hurting gamers, it would hurt a lot. At the moment I just finished re-downloading Crysis after I messed up the game (ouch), along with a high resolution texture pack and writing a custom config file for the game to grab as much as possible out of CryEngine 2. Crysis was 6.51GB big from Steam without the high resolution textures. Add in this high-res mod and I’m looking at close to 9GB of data. These screenshots below are reduced Bitmap images (the images would have been massive, over 40MB per bitmap if I kept them at full resolution, so I scaled them down. But take a look at the fine details in them). This is what I was capable of running on this box in 2007 with some slight overclocking of my older hardware. Now, it’s 2009 and games are getting very, very big and this box handles it like a charm without the need for overclocking, and Crysis still stresses this box out despite the i7 and the 3 video cards in SLi, full anti-aliasing and all. Internet capping would hurt me big time as I’ve stated numerous times, even if I did end my hobby of gaming.
http://www.filefront.com/14683895/Crysis.zip
You’ve seen some of the scenes in a video I posted up ages ago back when we were beta testing the theme, but that was before I had the custom config in place or even a high resolution texture mod.
How much storage does the Go have for games? Can it only hold one, or allow multiple games? With some “metered-billing”, and capped billing ideas out there it seems some of the bigger games may cost double the retail value for the game on PS3 at the rate things are going. Not much of a portable gamer, or iPhone user or all that junk myself. I like my phone to do two things, make and take calls. I did have the original Gameboy back int he day before color screens. It is still around here somewhere, and Tetris works on it just fine for me, so probably will never see a cost for any games on the Go. I wonder what Sony will do for people with failed downloads due to ISPs capping and such?
The PSP Go comes with 16GB of internal flash memory. Speaking of the Game Boy, I still have my older GameBoy Color and my GameBoy Advance sitting around. Loved playing those handhelds with games like Battleship or Donkey Kong.
This applies to XBox Live, Steam, Direct2Drive, etc.
It’s a tax pretty much. People are supposed to hate taxes, right?
True Bill. And might I add, most of the modern game consoles are now offering Netflix or some other service to download movies. So it isn’t just downloading games that is a factor but other media too.