Sony struggling to convince publishers to support PSP, admits PlayStation executive
But adds that the handheld is still in its early days
Shuhei Yoshida has barely put on ex Sony Worldwide Studios main man Phil Harrison's shoes, but already it seems that this PlayStation veteran has little trouble in facing facts.
While he recognises the tremendous sales performance boost PSP has enjoyed in Japan so far this year and his overall message when speaking to industry site gi.biz was one of Sony continuing to support its handheld, Yoshida did commented on the PSP's less impressive position in Europe:
"It's too early to make judgements – 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. "But when they really focus on what they can do with the platform, there are still lots of good business opportunities that are still viable, and will continue to be, because there are no competing platforms."
Er, we can think of one. Yoshida goes on to resort to the popular 'different platforms, different demographics' line that is being increasingly used to downplay Nintendo's recent success with the casual market.
That argument carries some weight, sure, but when third-party publishers are concentrating solely on DS with regards to where their handheld games end up, Nintendo's portable success story becomes an adversary Sony needs to face head on.
And from a consumer's perspective, the thing we'd draw attention to is that though many pocket gamers opt for both a PSP and a DS, there are still plenty out there who buy one over the other. So each handheld, no matter how different they are from one another, eats into the other's sales in some way across the different territories.
But, hey, that's all academic and it's good to read from the rest of his comments that Harrison's successor is looking to back the handheld. But he'll need more than just his enthusiasm to convince more third-party publishers to give the PSP another bite at the cherry.