Its sales success in Japan aside, you could say PSP is having a bad month. Certainly in terms of press coverage there's been a fair bit of negativity, and today developer Ready At Dawn added to the console's woes by announcing it's officially finished with PSP development.
According to a
blog post added yesterday to the company's website, its PSP dev kits are being sent back. "(...)Seeing all these boxes ready to be picked up definitely marks the end of an era here at Ready At Dawn," reads the post, before confirming: "With
Chains of Olympus going Gold [ready for manufacturing] in Japan, we're now officially done with PSP development."
Ready At Dawn's previously reported decision to move onto developing for other systems should be considered a massive blow for PSP. The studio has been responsible for two of the most successful games for the console:
God of War: Chain of Olympus, which is currently bearer of the crown for best PSP game over at
Metacritic, having scored an average of 91 per cent in reviews, and
Daxter, which is an excellent adventure and one of the PSP's biggest selling games, having shifted over two million units since release.
Clearly no format can afford to be losing support of this calibre, and certainly not PSP given its precarious position in the west. Only last week, Rob Cooper of Ubisoft blamed what he perceives as the handheld's
lack of direction for decreasing publisher interest, while Sony Europe's president David Reeves has admitted
not enough games are coming from third-party publishers for the console in Europe.
Of course, it's not all bad news for Sony's handheld. Its phenomenal sales performance in Japan so far this year means a boom of games from Japanese developers is expected, and despite our views on them, applications such as
Skype,
Go! Explore and
Go! View could boost sales here in Europe and in the US.
But there's no denying that while Ready At Dawn might be excitedly moving onto a new area of games development, PSP is going to be all the worse off for it.
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