PSP Go

~ the obituary ~

psp go was the kind of thing a sony fan with disposable income bought to feel ahead of the curve. i was not in that demographic. by late '09 i was finishing university with a thinkpad and a desktop, the only handheld i carried around was a phone. the psp existed in turkey at that point, mostly on consignment-shelf shops in unkapanı and behind the glass at teknosa, but the psp go specifically was a thing you read about in chip dergisi and never quite saw on a shelf in person.

sony announced the redesign at e3 2009 as the future of the psp line. the umd disc drive was gone. games came from the playstation store over wifi, the device had 16gb of internal flash and a memory stick micro slot. the form factor was a slider where the screen slid up to reveal the controls. it was 43% lighter than the original psp-1000, also it cost $50 more than the slim model already on shelves.

i remember reading the launch reviews online and not understanding the pricing. the slim psp-3000 sold for $169 with a umd drive that could read every existing psp game your friend had. the psp go sold for $249 with no umd drive and required you to rebuy your library on the store, sometimes at full price, because not every umd game even had a digital release. people noticed. media create reported around 28,000 japanese sales the first week and the number got worse from there.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the loudest noise around the psp go in fall 2009 came from gamestop banning the device from its stores in protest, because a download-only handheld cuts out the used-game trade that retailers run as their actual margin business. amazon and best buy kept it on shelves but did not push it. by late '09 most coverage had moved on to talking about whatever sony's next handheld would be.

on the hardware side it was a nice object. the slider felt good and the screen-to-body ratio was better than the psp-1000. the battery was smaller than the regular psp because the umd drive's space and power budget had gone away. four hours of game time was the real number people reported. for short commutes that was enough, for a long trip you needed the included usb cable and a wall outlet on the other end.

~ the slide ~

the umd-to-digital migration plan was the bigger problem. sony floated a vague program where umd owners could get digital copies of their games at a discount, then walked it back, then floated it again with conditions, then quietly stopped mentioning it. the implication was that buying a psp go meant the umd library you already owned was now stuck on the older psp in the drawer. for the same money you could keep the slim psp and buy a few new games.

publishers had their own problem with the model. without a physical sku the back-of-store shelf marketing they relied on did not work. some major releases skipped the psn entirely in the first year of the psp go's life. metal gear solid peace walker shipped on umd in june 2010 with a digital version coming later, by which point the psp go conversation was already over. sony stopped manufacturing it for europe and japan on april 20 '11. north america lingered for a few more months. the vita got announced the same year and the psp go became a footnote in the announcement reels.

~ what carried over ~

the psp go is the early answer to a question every console maker eventually asks, what happens if you ship the disc-less variant of an existing system. xbox one s all-digital and ps5 digital edition both arrived a decade later with the same physical-game-removal pitch at a smaller discount. the psp go's mistake was the price direction, more expensive instead of cheaper, with no plan to bring your existing library along.

on the secondary market it became a collector's piece pretty quickly. people who actually liked the form factor held onto theirs and the price stayed above msrp for years on yahoo auctions japan. the slider hinge developed a known weakness, the internal battery degraded, custom firmware kept it useful longer than sony intended. as a piece of hardware history it sits next to the n-gage and the gizmondo, the handheld variant nobody asked for that nobody bought.

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