PSP: Luxury for dummies

So, here it is, Sony's Portable Playstation is available everywhere in the world. And I already hate it. Well, "hate" is a big, unsuitable word which involves passions that this piece of hardware doesn't stir. The PSP annoys me. It annoys me because it's under the spotlight, it's getting attention. As usual I'm more annoyed at people (because they are paying attention to this gimmick) than I am at the thing itself, which is just what I described in the title: a luxury, vanitous, useless product for people who don't care what it is as long as it's worth showing off. Wasting money on it is just a part of the process.

I got annoyed very early, basically when the buzz started ("hey, Sony is going to release a new luxury product") and succeeded in grabbing people's attention, from the passerby to the chief executive of game company. A friend and I were discussing about it, and we found ourselves equally annoyed. My friend though, who is a game industry insider, highlighted some issues I wasn't much aware of. For instance, the PSP's direct competitor is Nintendo's DS, another portable game console with a radically different approach. It's completely different from any game system released before: it features two screens, one is touch-sensitive and you can interact with it by using a touch pen. There is also a voice-recognition system and classic control buttons. In addition, the little beast comes at an affordable price and has some pretty exciting games available (Yoshi Touch'N Go, Pac Pix and some adventure game whose name I forgot).

For me, this is definitely a winner. I liked what I tried at least. But go figure, it doesn't seem people in the West agree. The system seems quite good, and yet people are all dazzled by Sony's marketing, some prefer the PSP over the DS and go as far as selling the latter one to buy a PSP, on the sole basis that it looks more luxurious than the DS. I'm not making this up, some people who had just bought a DS resold it to get a PSP only for that reason ! So if Nintendo was to sell a $500 portable console who can show them some satellite imagery a la Google Map, we can most certainly assume they would sell their PSP to buy this new toy. People are awfully stupid which reminds me why I write this blog.

In the East now, the situation is interestingly different: the Nintendo DS is selling much more than the Sony PSP; according to what I've been told, it sells twice more DS every week in Japan than PSP. But what my friend explained which surprised me greatly is the reaction from game makers. Without games, a console can't live, and without consoles, game makers can't live either. Because the DS is selling that well all over the world and in Japan in particular, you'd think that of course, they are making a lot of games for it, like they are, say, making lots of games for the Sony Playstation 2, which is very popular too. Well, that's where it becomes nasty, because we are wrong, logic shall not prevail: somehow, game makers largely favor the PSP and show their support by making more games.

I did not get it so I asked my friend why would game makers make more games for the console which seems far less profitable and interesting for them. I will try to quote him: "Because it's Sony. Sony are rich and powerful, it's a big company, they mean security to them. While Nintendo's ideas might be more interesting and better for the customers, this is less important than what Sony can provide them with, stability, security. If Sony wasn't Sony, if they weren't making so much money elsewhere then the situation would be different." You see, that's why in my first entry I told you how much I hated big corporations. Enron and World dot com were not just black sheeps, they were a model of unfairness and absurdity in what rules the business world.

Finally, maybe I truly hate the PSP and Sony along with it, because it stands for all this. A mass syndrom of idiocy, manipulating people and companies thanks to their billion assets rather than skill and ideas. Just like Microsoft versus Mozilla, Nike versus honest American shoe manufacturers, etc. The decisions we make, even the smaller ones in favor of companies like that, shape the world of tomorrow and determine our futures. By helping these companies to grow bigger day by day we just ensure we make our future worse and worse. You know the saying... you recolt what you sow, and after letting capitalism grow to such heights, the only thing left for us to do will be to follow its trail of destruction: unemployment, pollution, corruption, collapse of public services, politics obediance, misery, poverty and on the other hand astronomical wealths.