Bolstered by comments from Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) President and CEO Ken Kutaragi and the announcement of an official release date for the game "Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade," the gaming world is abuzz with word that PlayStation Portables (PSP) will be available for sale in the United States and Europe in March.
Sony released the PSP, its first entry into the hand-held gaming market, on December 12 in Japan and said it has sold 510,000 units. The company said Brotherhood, a multi-player action game, will be released "at the PSP's launch in March."
The PSP's release trails that of the Nintendo 
DS, which
came out November 21 in the United States and December 2 in Japan.
Nintendo Gets Jump on Sales
Nintendo has sold about 1.5 million units of the dual-screen players and is increasing its projected sales figures. Sony said it hopes to sell 3 million PSPs by March 31 but admitted that will be a tough target to reach, partly because of semiconductor shortages.
"The launch of Nintendo's DS was a success," Jay Horwitz, senior analyst at Jupiter Media, told TechNewsWorld. "PSP has some more substantial challenges. One of them is battery life. A portable device that's dedicated to gaming has to have enough juice to get through some intensive sessions. The report is that the battery life is not there."
But Michael Cai, senior analyst at Parks Associates , said he thinks Sony is
targeting a different audience from Nintendo. He said Nintendo's Game Boy
and DS are aimed at a younger group -- preteens and teens -- and that Sony
is looking at young adults.
"The PSP is sleek and doesn't look like a kid's toy," Cai told TechNewsWorld. "It has very good graphics and the screen looks awesome. I think it's going to be well received."
Lower Than Expected Price
He called the price point surprisingly low, saying Sony originally talked
about a US$300 price tag, but is selling the unit in Japan for 19,800 yen, or
about $190. Nintendo's DS costs $150. Cai said Sony was replaying the strategy
it used with the PlayStation 2 -- selling the hardware cheaply and relying
on profits from game sales.
One big factor in capturing the young adult market could be the PSP's ability to play video and audio files, Cai said. PSP uses Sony's proprietary Universal Media discs (UMD) for storage. The unit will play MP3s and MPEG4s, but files must be stored on UMDs.
To play files not on the miniature UMDs, consumers would have to buy software to convert it to the MPEG-4 video format that the PSP and Memory Stick support. Both Cai and Horwitz questioned whether a proprietary storage format was the way to go.
Is It Worth It?
Horwitz was also less enthusiastic about the multimedia function. "Is it [music and video playback] something people really want and are willing to pay for? How well are they executing on video and audio when they've gone with a proprietary format?" he asked.
One other roadblock for Sony is that Nintendo DS is backward compatible with its GameBoy Advance format, while anyone who buys the PSP will have to start from scratch.
"Sony does have a rich catalog of content available, but how easy will it be to port it?" Horwitz questioned.
There will be more than a dozen games available when the PSP hits the U.S.
market. They reportedly will range in price from $24 to $46. The PSP is also
WiFi compatible and links to a computer through a USB 2.0 port.
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