GDCE 2007: Sony snubs PSP during key San Francisco speech

Like everyone else, we've been waiting for weeks now to see what Sony would have to say during the critical keynote speech it gave this evening at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

But while the speech had plenty to excite PlayStation 3 fans, it was striking how PSP was left almost completely out of the picture.

In a speech entitled Game 3.0, Sony Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison outlined a typically exciting vision of what he saw as the future of games and, naturally, Sony's part in it.

In particular, he revealed a new online space for PlayStation 3 gamers, called PlayStation Home, which fused the best of MySpace, Xbox Live and other community-focused and heavily customisable systems with sophisticated ways of enabling gamers to access new media such as music and movies.

Harrison also outlined how PlayStation 3 owners would be able to share everything from scores and messages to user-generated content.

But sadly, very little of this seemed to apply to PSP, even though the handheld is seemingly wedded to its bigger, newer brother; the only official way to get PSone titles onto PSP is via a PlayStation 3, for instance.

Instead, PSP's role was limited to little more than a visual gag when one popped up in a demo of the user space at the centre of the PlayStation 3 'Home' experience.

We're not one for alarmist sentiments here at Pocket Gamer – we've backed the PSP as long as hard as anybody – but the lack of any place for its portable device in today's GDC speech is astonishing. We would have thought extending the Home metaphor onto the PSP would be a no-brainer, and allow Sony to gain an edge of Microsoft, and compete more directly with Nintendo, given the DS lacks the PSP's multimedia punch.

It's possible Sony has not yet resolved some piracy or digital rights management issues it needs to enable the PSP to blossom and play a key iPod-like role in conjunction with PlayStation 3's central hub.

We certainly hope so, because the alternative – that Sony has decided PSP has no place in its future – is far more depressing.