PlayStation Meeting 2005

Sony's annual PlayStation meeting for 2005 has kicked off in Tokyo and some details are beginning to emerge. Aside from the serious business end of things, Sony laid on drinks and entertainment and staged their 2005 Playstation Awards, acknowledging the best selling titles of the last financial year. Among those honoured, Hideo Kojima picked up a gong for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (pictured with Ken Kutaragi).



Getting down to business, Sony outlined the path ahead for PS3 development kits, beginning with the already released Cell evaluation unit and the soon-to-be-released PS3 evaluation tool. By December, Sony plans to have rack-mountable PS3 reference tools available to developers that will contain the final PS3 components.






Details on PSP's future were also anounced, with firmware version 2.0 to be released in only a few days (July 27). Version 2.0 of the firmware incorporates the long-awaited wireless web-browser into the OS, adding another main icon to the PSP's XMB menu. Full HTML4.0 support has been confirmed, but details of Flash support are sketchy so far. Many other small improvements have been made in v2.0, including increased picture file support (TIFF, BMP, GIF formats added), an option to customize backgrounds, and the ability to play videos off the memory stick at PSP's full 480x272 resolution (at last). There's also a new function to share photos between nearby PSPs wirelessly, and support for the more secure TKIP wireless encryption standard. Since the 2.0 announcement, Sony reps overseas have confirmed that the Euro/Aus/NZ PSPs will come with version 2 firmware at launch on September 1.




UMD sales have been rising steadily since the PSP's release (as shown in the graph above), and while UMD video is selling well in the US (back row), it hasn't really taken off in Japan and Korea (where UMD movies are considerably more expensive). The Ceramic White PSP is now confirmed for release and will be available in Japan soon.

PSP Piracy Ahoy!

PSP pirates hoist sails, set to take wind out of game sales?

It's now possible to run pirated PSP games off the memory stick. A few days ago a launcher was released allowing Lumines to run from the memory stick. The floodgates opened soon afterwards, and it became possible to run about half a dozen games (including the high-profile new FPS Coded Arms) from the memory stick without the original UMD. It looks like the release of a single universal game launcher is only days away.

I'm deliberately not reporting this in much detail or providing any links, as I personally see this as a disaster for a game platform that hasn't even launched in half the world yet. Homebrew didn't pose any real threat to the PSP (it may have even helped hardware sales), but this kind of piracy could be a critical blow to Sony's handheld. Developers will certainly be wary of investing large budgets into PSP game production when they know that most PSP owners can simply run pirate copies without any modification to their console. Unlike most other methods of console piracy, this PSP method requires no modchip, and no technical knowledge. It's entirely "warez kiddy" friendly. Even Sony's recent mandatory firmware updates in new release games don't stop this method from working. (This method works under v1.50, which so far no games have required the firmware to be upgraded above.)

In the short term, I imagine Sony will make a bit of extra revenue from a boost in sales of their overpriced memory stick duos, but they must find a way to curb this kind of piracy if PSP is to be a success in the longer term.