Seems like the PSP Go's finally bit the dust.

Can't say I didn't see this coming.

I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did, honestly. I was a die-hard Sony fanboy when it came out, and I still didn't like it.

You know, this is gonna bug me for the rest of the thread, but...

Is it "bit the dust" or "bitten the dust"?

The former, but go bug a real grammar person about it, I guess.

I'm surprised it didn't die immediately.

Bitten.

I am not even slightly surprised. It was bound to happen; only a matter of time.

I'm pretty certain the Go's were a market experiment masked as a legit product.

If nothing else this should give serious pause to people who think DLC will replace physical media. That is almost certainly why the Go didn't work.

Maybe that will happen someday (I fear), but at least not anytime soon.

We'd pretty much need to live in the world of Rockman EXE for that distribution model to make any sense at all.

Who says that we won't in a few years?

Heh, that would probably even surprise conspirancy-theorist-who-I-have-to-work-with.

Technology isn't the big obstacle to DLC-focus, IMO. Its corporate psychology. They have to begin accepting that digital and DLC are detriments to the consumer ( versus proper ownership ), and thus they need to provide balancing value to make it worthwhile. Valve already knows this; others need to learn.

I don't think it's necessarily the distribution model; there's nothing inherently wrong with that, given the success and convenience of Steam. I'd argue that the industry is trending towards that direction, with more and more games becoming downloadable and, hopefully, redownloadable if they're tied to an online account somehow.

I think this is what really killed the Go:

• it was touted as an upgrade, despite removing features that previous PSP models had (most notably, of course, the UMD drive).
• the PSN's collection of PSP games, while much better now, is still not the entire library, and thus there's always going to be games that it could not play — most notably Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep, widely considered a killer app for the system.
• in keeping with treating it like an upgrade, it was $80 more expensive than the next PSP model and had less features — there was absolutely no logical reason for that premium.
• Sony promised multiple times that there would be a way to transfer your physical UMDs to digital data, and then never followed through on that promise — which scorned a lot of people and turned them off from the thing.
• I believe they said they were treating a problem that people had been complaining about — their proprietary UMD format — but they didn't seem to realize it was several years after the PSP and that format had ingrained itself and that you can't uproot that infrastructure midway through (hence the assurances that the NGP will be much better about that).
• And finally, they announced that almost all of the above was a supposed effort to combat piracy, which lent the whole device the air that hangs over the more restrictive types of DRM — the kind that screws over the legit consumer while pirates and hackers get a better experience (though I'm not sure if they ever did hack the Go).

edited 19th Apr '11 8:29:40 AM by WildKnight

It didn't help that they marketed it horribly, as well.

They pretty much made every possible mistake they could in making and marketing the PSP Go that they could without outright breaking the law.

It kind of is. The whole idea of "DLC-focus" is dependent on the condition that

A) everyone has high-speed internet
B) that high-speed internet is reliable and never has problems or downtime
C) even with both of those being met, people will be fine with no physical media.

A and B haven't happened yet, let alone C.

When the PSP Go is down to $30 or something, I'll pick it up. I never owned a PSP, so I don't have any UM Ds I don't have to be frustrated about Sony not letting me transfer.

And there are a few games - including some old ones - that I want to play. Crush, Patapon series, etc.

Indeed, there are quite a few places in the US that are stuck on dialup because no one will pay to have them wired for broadband.

bytheway it still alive

http://www.vg247.com/2011/04/21/scea-production-on-pspgo-continuing-in-north-america/

Whatever. One less system on the market.

I hope the PS 3 or PSP dies, too. That way, I'll have less to keep track of.

It's sad, because I haven't heard about this thing until now. When it failed.

NEVER!

But it's bad enough that I can't even get BBS because the P costs 200.