Sony: Mistakes Were Made With the PSPgo

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Sony Senior Vice President Rob Dyer sat down with website Industry Gamers and gave a very candid interview on the upcoming future of Sony’s PSP handheld gaming unit. During the interview, he said some things that you won’t hear from Sony very often, including that the recent PSPgo SKU which doesn’t use physical media was too expensive and confused consumers.

Dyer told the website that piracy has been lagging the PSP platform for a few years now. The PSP is easily hackable to allow pirated games and media content on the device, which affects sales of PSP games. Dyer says that game publishers were not making the profits they expected or saw early in the handheld’s lifetime, and Sony was attempting to correct this.

Dyer says that the media-less PSPgo was one of their strategies for combating piracy. He says the thinking behind the PSPgo and its direct download offerings was that people were pirating because they didn’t want to go to the retail store, so the PSPgo allowed them to get new PSP games without leaving home. However, Sony’s now learned what the rest of us knew people pirate content because they’re cheap, not lazy.

Sony believes, Dyer says, that many new consumers didn’t understand that the PSPgo featured a hard drive and used digital-only versions of games, which led to much confusion. He also says something that applies to so many Sony products: “Yeah, I think the higher price point didn’t help matters any either.”

However, things may be turning around for the PSP. Dyer says that they’re going to try to recommunicate with consumers what the PSPgo is. Also, they’ve got some solid high-profile games coming out for the PSP this year, and Dyer predicts that 2010 will be a good year for the handheld.

Dyer declined to comment on a new PSP2 handheld coming out anytime soon. Industry Gamers speculates that we’ll see one announced this year at a trade show, but we’re not so convinced.