Sony: PSP a “Ten Year Product,” to Continue Evolving

The PlayStation Portable celebrated its third birthday earlier this week, but that’s only a dent in the lifecycle that Sony sees it as having. John Koller, the PSP’s senior marketing manager, explained that Sony intends to stay true to form and continue adjusting to the market by way of new hardware iterations and firmware updates.

“We’ve talked about the PSP being a 10 year product, but a 10 year product in the continued… how can I put this… in the continued lifecycle, so we obviously had the 1000, we have the 2000, so the PSP as it was first launched in March 2005 isn’t going to the be the PSP that it ends up as in 10 years, but it will still be a very strong portable gaming device that is centered in gaming and has a lot of multi-functional features.

“We look at it just like our console business being a 10 year cycle, but we do see iterations as we go along to really adjust to the market. What we’ve done is, the 2000 series adjusted to the market in terms of making it more portable. What we’re seeing now, at least in the near- to mid-term, is going to be firmware updates that add features and other functions that the consumer’s asked for.”

The PSP Lite (read: 2000) has been a huge success for Sony; they’ve seen “an incredible jump in demand - so much so that we really had a worldwide demand bump that was very, very significant and allowed us to increase our total shipments worldwide… In North America, we saw an 85% jump since the price drop in April of last year and we’ve really seen a wide variety of casual gamers get into the PSP market.”

Okay, so a ten year lifecycle, but when does the PSP 2 come into the picture? That’s the real issue at hand.

via Next Gen