How Sony Can Guarantee the PSP2’s Success

With portable gaming struggling to get a solid foothold on the market in recent years, Sony and Nintendo need to pull out all the stop with the PSP2 and 3DS. With the 3DS having the obvious novelty factor of portable 3D gaming, what do Sony need to make the general public sit up and take notice? Everyone is desperate to see two analogue sticks, so we’ve ignored that and come up with a few other essentials. Feel free to add your own thoughts in our comments section.

1. Unified online gaming
If the PSP2 is as powerful as some are making out, then online gaming certainly shouldn’t be a problem. So why not let PSP2 and PS3 owners game against each other? As well as the obvious increase in people playing online, this will give families the chance to game against each other easily, or even team up against others online. In days where split-screen online gaming is such a rarity, that’s quite a mouth watering prospect.

2. Comfort
Nothing is worse than the “PSP Claw” – the shape your hand forms involuntarily after playing on the PSP for more than an hour or so. Small devices have always suffered a similar problem all the way back to the Gameboy, but there was a PSP peripheral which hooked onto the PSP to give it the shape of a Sixaxis controller. While it isn’t ideal for carrying in your pocket, for times when you know you’ll be there for a couple of hours it’s essential. Sony need to offer comfort from day 1 in some shape or form.

3. A First Person Shooter
But a real FPS. While the PSP had the excellent Killzone Liberation, and did a pretty good job with the Resistance shooter, the single analogue nub wasn’t ideal for shooting games. With the right buttons included the PSP2 could punch its weight with the “proper” consoles and let’s face it, there are people who will break a limb to rush out and buy a PSP2 if Sony manage to capture a special edition of COD…

4. The PSP2 as a Gaming Device
Does anyone really want the PSP2 to be a phone? Cram it full of gaming goodness and leave the phone stuff elsewhere.

5. Online friends and Trophies
Love them or loathe them, trophies add an element that some people just can’t resist. Synchronising them with an existing PSN account will ramp up the competitive nature of trophies all the way to 11. A lot of people buy games for no reason other than to win trophies, that’s why some strange grown men ended up playing Hannah Montana for hours. Sony could shift a huge number of units for that reason alone.

6. PS3-style unhackability
If it’s not a word, it should be. The unhackability of the PS3 has been quite impressive, and recent attempts to break in have been foiled so far by Sony. The PSP suffered massively from piracy due to the easy way you could install custom firmware, and low priced games won’t help stop the pirates either. A huge number of iPhone and iPod owners jailbreak to get free games that normally cost 59p.

7. Quality
The biggest thing the PSP2 needs to avoid is to be swamped with low-rate rushed games from developers hoping to cash in on the novelty factor of the new handheld. While it’s important to have a good number of games at launch, they need to be good. Really good. Good enough for people to buy a PSP2 and have a huge dilemma as to which games they should buy with it, then go back a week later and buy more. An explosive start will get the media onside, and a happy media makes a world of difference. Just ask John Terry.