While the phrase "console war" tends to conjure up images of, you know, consoles, don't think the battle between handhelds was any less contentious back in the day. The mid-'00s battle between Sony's PlayStation Portable and Nintendo's DS seems pretty one-sided in retrospect, but it certainly didn't seem that way at the time. Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden certainly remembers how threatening his company's entry into the handheld market felt.
"I remember when we showed the first PSP back in – what was that? 2003, '04, '05, something like that," Layden recalls in an interview with The Expansion Pass. "I had a friend who was working at Nintendo, and he sent me a text message saying, 'You bastards.' I said, 'Hey, bro, you know, it's all fun and games."
By the time the DS was revealed, Nintendo was the unquestioned king of gaming handhelds. Other portable devices had found some success over the years, but the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance had sold hundreds of millions of units. No other publisher was brave – or foolish – enough to enter that space, even with the DS turning to a radical new direction with its multiple screens and touch interface.
Nintendo would ultimately find success with the DS by reaching out to a wider, more casual gaming market, and by the end of the platform's life it had already sold over 154 million units. The PSP's 76 million units sold might seem paltry by comparison, but it's by far the biggest sales number any non-Nintendo handheld has ever put up. But rampant piracy made it pretty difficult for Sony to actually sell games for the PSP.
"PSP did reasonably well, but then the OS got hacked and you could jailbreak it pretty easily," Layden admits. The platform's savior was "a little game called Monster Hunter," whose co-op focus meant that players across Japan were convincing their friends to pick up their own consoles and copies of the game to join in each others' hunts.
With rumors of a PS6 handheld heating up, Layden warns that "Sony has always struggled in marketing two platforms at the same time. PS3 was a struggle, but PSP was very successful. Then Vita came out and that was doing well, but then PS3 got itself into a better place. You only have so many marketing dollars and so you're trying to put them against different products."
Layden suggests that "if Sony does get in the handheld business again, you might almost set up a different company to do it. That would be their only focus instead of having one marketing budget trying to put it against a handheld and a console and software. It loses its focus."
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/ex-playstation-boss-recalls-nintendo-employees-reaction-to-the-psp-reveal-you-bastards
