The Future of the PSP
By: TCLCloud, Founder of PSP117

Firstly, I’d like to say that the PSP is not dead; neither is it dying in fact. There have been a lot of articles lately saying how the PSP is dying out when in the fact it’s not at all. PSP sales may not be as high as the DS but then they are still at a consistent rate every month while the DS will fade out now seeing as it’s already released its highest profile games.
The PSP, on the other hand, still has a lot of big games to release in the future: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories and Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core are just 2 of the future big hits. I’m sure both of these titles will be huge and the only thing that could be better than a new GTA or Final Fantasy is of course the PSOne emulator for the PSP. Sony hasn’t confirmed how this will work yet but we know it’ll be released this Autumn and there are a few theories on how it might work……

- Firmware update from Sony provides the PSOne emulator on your PSP and you download games that you purchase from the Sony website.
- The Firmware update again, provides you with the emulator on your PSP and you can use your PSOne disks and “rip” the game using Sony provided software and store them onto your memory stick to be played on your PSP.
- The PSOne games will be bought just like any other PSP game (UMD) and then this is played via the PSOne emulator stored on the PSP. Or maybe because it’s on UMD it will just run the game like normal.

It seems most likely that Sony will make the PSOne ROMs available to download from a portal and are then saved onto your memory stick. Sony may even release new memory sticks with games preloaded onto them. However if the price of them doesn't fall then it could well have a negative impact on the sale of PSOne ROMs.
On another note I don’t think that UMD films are quite dead either. The price of them was high but now its seems they are falling every few weeks. On Amazon the price of UMD’s has fallen to around £10 or less! As long as the best films and series are available to watch on the PSP cheaply then I can’t see the UMD being phased out as quickly as everyone is speculating.
Also set for release soon is the PSP camera, which is supposed to have an eye-toy type game being made available for it and video calls over wireless internet. Another add-on for the PSP is also the GPS receiver which is meant to be used for things like SatNav I’d imagine but could also be incorporated into games. Both of these devices are set to be released around September/October time this year.
To sum up, the future of the PSP is bright at least. Just this year we’re set to have some great new games, digital camera and GPS and of course the PSOne emulator all on our PSP systems, which is set to have around 7000 ROMS to play by the end of 2007