Every PSP firmware update is a confession

Another firmware update for the PSP, and another set of features that have nothing to do with playing games. There is a web browser. There is an RSS reader. There is the ability to stream television from a box in your house. You can now buy old PlayStation titles and run them on it.

Sony describes this as a portable entertainment platform. I read it as a company adding features to a machine whose main purpose is not going well.

The hardware is genuinely excellent, which is what makes this frustrating. The screen is beautiful, it is the right size, the build is solid, and the graphics are close enough to a home console of the previous generation that developers should have been queuing up. None of the problems are in the plastic.

The problem is that the games did not come, and there is a structural reason.

Making a PSP title costs something close to making a console title, because the machine is capable enough to demand real assets, real modelling, real voice work. But the audience is smaller and the price you can charge is lower. So the return on a serious PSP project is worse than the return on the same effort spent elsewhere, and publishers have quietly worked this out. What arrives instead is ports, spin-offs, and cut-down versions of things that exist on a console.

Then there is the disc format, which deserves its own note. Putting films on UMD looked reasonable on a slide. In practice you were asked to buy a copy of a film that plays on exactly one device, at a price close to the DVD that plays on everything you own. The studios have mostly stopped bothering, and it is hard to argue they were wrong.

What I keep coming back to is that every one of these additions is a feature nobody bought the machine for. Nobody purchased a games handheld in order to read news headlines on a train.

Features are cheap and firmware is free, so when the software line-up is thin the temptation to keep announcing things is enormous. It fills a press release. It does not fill the gap, because the gap is a games library, and no amount of firmware produces one.

There is a version of this device that would have sold in enormous numbers, and I think it costs half as much, has a worse screen, and comes with the sort of odd, cheap, inventive software that a lower budget makes possible. Sony built the impressive one instead, and impressive is not the same as wanted.