Sony Computer Entertainment took its first steps into the handheld gaming sector on Sunday when it launched its PSP (PlayStation Portable) in Japan. Thousands of people queued through the night to buy one of the devices and the initial supply of 200,000 units sold out in less than a day.
Sony Computer Entertainment Sunday took its first steps into the handheld gaming sector when it launched its PlayStation Portable in Japan. Thousands of people queued through the night to buy one of the devices and the initial supply of 200,000 units sold out in less than a day. On Friday, two days before the launch, Masa Chatani, CTO and corporate executive of SCEI, sat down with IDG News Service to talk about the PSP and what it means to his company. The following is excerpts from the interview.
IDGNS: Sony has said it will prepare 200,000 units for launch and 100,000 units per week for the next three weeks. What are your production plans for next year and the launches in the U.S. and Europe?
MC: It’s already ramping to prepare for Europe, U.S. and other territories and we already announced we plan to launch in U.S. and Europe by the end of our fiscal year, which is at the end of March, so we are trying to achieve that schedule right now.
IDGNS: The handheld market is new for Sony. What is its biggest challenge for you?
MC: This is battery operated. I think we overcame the technical obstacles and made long-life batteries.
IDGNS: Was battery life one of the biggest issues you faced in designing it?
MC: Our PSP is a very high-performance architecture and normally those high-performance CPUs need a lot of power. We tried to have a more intelligent power control mechanism to minimize the power consumption to give 4 to 6 hours of play and movies.
IDGNS: Does the battery life depend on the game being played?
MC: Some games may use more disc access or WiFi connection, which requires more power.
IDGNS: If I’m using a game that is heavily dependant on disc access and WiFi the battery life will be around 4 hours?
MC: Yes, around four-ish.
IDGNS: What do you think are the key features of the PSP?
MC: The first thing they will be impressed with the PSP is image quality. We introduced a wide-screen LCD for this product. I think this will be a very beautiful LCD that people have never seen before. They will become impressed with the quality of the games. I would say its more than PS2 in some sense. Also, it has WiFi capability so that means you can connect to you friends over the wireless network so by taking advantage of the WiFi network, game design can be different from the conventional console because its not necessary to share a screen.
IDGNS: What type of customer will be attracted?
MC: In general we always target everyone with a product but each game may have a targeted audience.
IDGNS: Nintendo talks about “gamer-drift” and says the game software market is decreasing as people move away from games to other forms of entertainment. What’s your view?
MC: It might be a macro-issue because the number of young people is decreasing. When we take a train, people are playing games on cell phones. In that sense, the audience may be increasing because they play games if they have appropriate product. So I think we just didn’t have the appropriate product to satisfy them.
IDGNS: What’s your proposition to people who play games on cellular telephones?
MC: One thing is the quality of the games.We are planning to support the video and audio content as well. People who are interested in contents other than games will have a strong motivation to play videos and movies when they commute.
IDGNS: What are you plans in the audio and video space?
MC: We are still in discussion with various digital contents publishers. That will include the studios in Hollywood and labels in New York. They are all pretty much interested in publishing their content on PSP. This is a huge opportunity for them because they already have the content on DVD and its easier to bring the content to PSP.
IDGNS: Regarding the Universal Media Disc (UMD), why did you need a new format?
MC: I think the shortest answer is, there is no appropriate media for this kind of device so we decided to make it on our own. Also, we found stronger copy protection was needed for the new media.
IDGNS: Is there any region coding?
MC: Technically speaking, we implement some region code mechanism but for games we will have none implemented.
IDGNS: How about peripherals?
MC: We showed some prototypes at E3. A USB camera, GPS, a telephone adapter and a microphone headset. None of them are announced yet. Some are under development. We are planning to have a PSP version of an EyeToy-like application.
IDGNS: What was your biggest headache in designing the PSP?
MC: I think the biggest problem was for the hardware engineers. Because the thickness of the drive and the thickness of the LCD with the backlight is the same as the PSP’s (total) thickness so it’s very difficult for other hardware to be implemented in this thin configuration. Also, it has a huge battery. There are a lot of limitations in implementing hardware design.
IDGNS: Have you been using it much recently?
MC: Yeah, I play it a lot. All of the launch titles are very good even though the developers had only a few months of development time. We were not able to provide (hardware) tools until late summer. Prior to that they had to develop on an emulator so it’s not a true performance situation.
IDGNS: When did you first make the emulators available?
MC: Last winter, although its very limited capability and not the full features, for example there was no (H.264) AVC. It’s very simple subset for the system and there is no UMD drive emulation at all. We delivered the hardware emulator in July.
IDGNS: How satisfied have you been with the PSP during your play in the last few days?
MC: I think its more than we anticipated and expected. When we started this project about one and a half years ago the actual PSP is much more than we targeted.
IDGNS: In what way?
MC: In overall quality, image quality, game quality, battery life and WiFi capability. We didn’t anticipate this kind of thing would really happen.
