Gamedivision.jp had an interview with Head of Product Planning for SCE, Naoya Matsui. In this interview he reveals that Sony were just waiting for the digital market to ‘mature’ a bit.
We wanted to release it when the delivery of digital content was on par with the delivery of physical media. That’s what we’ve been working on these past two years. We’ll be selling the PSP Go alongside the existing PSP models, because it’s a product targeted at those people who are more accustomed to digital content.
People still needed to get used to the digital format, but replacing an entire or atleast for now let it co-exist format will not go well with the people that stayed with an format deemed a failure from the start.
Talking about the hardware
We’d planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning. But if we’d simply released the hardware, there wouldn’t have been much for everyone to enjoy. We needed to prepare the right environment for it first, things like the transferral of content with the PS3 and PSN, and PC software to manage content like music and movies such as ‘Media Go
The content transferral is still not strong enough, especially in the SCEE region which is missing two important things which could have helped in measuring the popularity of digital downloads, those are the Video Store and PSN cards.
We hope Sony realises and do something about it before they launch the PSP Go!
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