PSP Go: A Portable Powerhouse, Portent, and Premonition
It’s 2009. The iPhone has been out for only two years, and smartphones are just now catching up - The world was at the very beginning of a consumer revolution: Multi-purpose, pocket sized computers were beginning to take over. This all-digital paradigm shift would not be fully realized until around 2016, when Apple claimed to have the “courage” to remove the headphone jack, thus relegating millions of users to a cordless existence. the iPhone itself, and many other smartphones and tablets, have not ever had a physical media drive (sd card, memory slot, cartridge port), and removable media and memory are nearly a thing of the past in 2020, for better or for worse.
Meanwhile, in the gaming market, Nintendo’s swift and undeniable ownership of the portable console market is well into its 30th year. the DSi, released worldwide in early 2009, did catch some flak for it’s lack of GBA backwards compatibility port, something Nintendo insisted on providing on their previous Dual Screen devices - but the trade off was tempting - no GBA slot for a much thinner, nicer device with better screens and longer battery life. Without the pesky GBA port in the way, Nintendo could make more room for better features, and the results speak for themselves, the DSi was a massive success, selling over 41 Million units worldwide.
It was under these two market pressures that the PSP Go was born. A desire by Sony to continue competing with Nintendo in the portable market, as well as a demand for hyper-portable, all-digital devices from the smart phone market, something that Sony was having trouble competing in up until this point.
Sony was, at some point, the King of single use devices - Sony portable TV’s, Sony Walkman, Sony Disc Players, Sony PDVD’s, Sony Ericsson, Sony Cybershot - There was almost no consumer electronic device that Sony didn’t make - until the advent of the iPhone. Suddenly, Sony was thrown on its back feet - The iPhone was a Walkman, and a portable tv, and a cybershot. The iPhone was a game console. The iPhone put single-use electronics to shame.
Yet, with all this being true, guess who still sold millions and millions of single use electronics? Nintendo. Nintendo, despite the iPhone’s popularity and functionality, managed to sell over 154 million units, 80 million of which were sold in a post-iPhone world. Sony wanted in - their PSP Series had been moderately successful, with tens of millions of sales, largely in Japan.
The PSP Go was a hail mary, and attempt to sell a cross-platform, multimedia device in a smartphone world - they did this by creating a device that resembled a smart phone both in design and size, as well as an all digital redesign that, in their minds, would line up more closely with the market as it was going to be in the future. So, did it work?
No. It was Sony’s biggest failure in the game market. The PSP Go sales were terrible, selling only tens of thousands of units in japan from it’s release date onwards, and sales dropping off even steeper in 2010 and 2011. At one point, Sony sold only 14 PSP Go in japan in a week, an embarrassing figure considering Nintendo sold 4600 DSi, and 46k 3DS that same week. It was official: The public HATED the PSP Go.
What went wrong? In a word: Everything. Sony got unlucky, and they made some mistakes with their marketing. The main issue was the fact that they offered an All-digital product with little incentive for using the all-digital services. Sony didn’t offer a conversion or swap program for users who had a large UMD collection and wanted to go digital, and they didn’t offer discounts or any sales incentive for users to jump into the digital marketplace for the Go. Furthermore, amazingly, the design of the product itself was, at the time, questioned - The PSP classic had a popular look and the PSP Go was not considered attractive in its design at the time. Looking back, its clear to see that the Go was the superior design in a lot of ways, but that little matters when it comes to the sales record of the Go.
In hindsight, the PSP go was a portent for the single-function electronics industry. Yet, despite the devices failure, it set the standard for future portable consoles: Digital storefronts, all digital consoles (Xbox and PlayStation have several in their home console lines now), and more portable variants of high selling consoles (Switch Lite, PSVITA slim) became the standard after the Go. It also showed single-function electronic manufacturers what NOT to do - Don’t remove features that users rely on (like the UMD drive), and don’t take users for granted - they are your market. You need them.
It’s easy to imagine a world where the Go was successful - Nothing would change. For better or for worse, the world adopted nearly all of the changes the PSP Go implemented - it was just a little bit too far ahead of itself to succeed during its time. Today, the Go is a gem for portable console/emulation enthusiasts - 16GB of onboard storage with expansion slot capability of up to 16GB more allows anyone access to the massive PSP game library in an extremely portable package - Plus, because of the clever hardware engineering of the PSP, most retro emulation (GB, GBC, GBA, NES, SNES, PS1, N64) runs nearly perfectly on the system, making it one of the best emulation consoles on the market, even today. All in all, the PSP Go is nearly perfect by today’s emulation console standards, and provides an excellent Jack-of-all-trades system for those who wish to relive the past while owning one of it’s most controversial relics.