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As part of a Japanese press conference discussing Sony's wider video game strategy, the company, headed by chief executive Ken Kutaragi, has made a number of important an...

Simon Carless, Blogger

July 21, 2005

1 Min Read

As part of a Japanese press conference discussing Sony's wider video game strategy, the company, headed by chief executive Ken Kutaragi, has made a number of important announcements relating to the PSP portable game console. In particular, version 2.0 of the PSP's operating system was officially announced. The upgrade, which will be made available to Japanese consumers next week, includes a fully-featured web browser (so far only officially available to Korean consumers), as well as support for downloading video in MPEG4 AVC format. Wireless PSP-to-PSP photo transfer and support for new media formats including the iTunes-compatible AAC were also announced. According to an IDG News report, specifically demonstrated was fee-based movie downloading from a PSP portal site that will be launched next week by SoNet, a Sony-affiliated Internet service provider in Japan, though pricing has not yet been revealed. Kutaragi also revealed that, thus far, 5.7 million PSP units had been shipped worldwide, and the company expected to ship 12 million units in the current business year, and that the company expected to increase its monthly UMD manufacturing amounts from 3 million to 5 million, largely due to a greater variety of (and hopefully demand for) UMD movies. Also announced at the conference was a variant white-colored PSP, scheduled to ship in Japan on September 15th for 24,800 yen ($220), the same price as the standard black-colored PSP. A Western release for the variant color has not yet been confirmed. Finall, the news conference revealed a number of new PSP games, including Luckluck Island, described by attendees as an Animal Crossing-style freeform title, as well as Namco's similarly expansive Portable Resort, and other titles including Gundam games, Metal Gear Acid 2, and a Talkman translation title.

About the Author(s)

Simon Carless

Blogger

Simon Carless is the founder of the GameDiscoverCo agency and creator of the popular GameDiscoverCo game discoverability newsletter. He consults with a number of PC/console publishers and developers, and was previously most known for his role helping to shape the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Conference for many years.

He is also an investor and advisor to UK indie game publisher No More Robots (Descenders, Hypnospace Outlaw), a previous publisher and editor-in-chief at both Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, and sits on the board of the Video Game History Foundation.

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