A week or two ago, a friend asked me about the PSP Go. In case you haven’t heard of it, basically Sony is released another iteration of the PSP. It plays all the same games as the original PSP, but the big difference is that the PSP Go doesn’t have a slot to put any discs in. All your games will be digital downloads, rather than physical matter. So the big question is if one “upgrades” from the PSP to the PSP Go, what does one do with all of their old games?

One obvious possibility is that you’re just plain fucked, and you’ll need to rebuy all of your old games again — at least, if you want to be able to play them “on the Go” (was this pun part of the strategy when Sony decided on the new name?). However, there were rumours that GameStop (an video game retail store chain based in America) and Sony had some sort of deal regarding the Go, but no details about this deal were released (at least they weren’t released a week ago — I’m a bit behind on my tech news, and haven’t followed anything since the weekend or so).

I don’t know what Sony and GameStop are planning, but if I were the “guy in charge”, here’s what I’d do: Let the customers bring in all their old games into the GameStop store, and trade them in for their digital equivalents (perhaps with a small handling fee of $2 to $5 per game or so). Additionally, offer some sort of deal if you bring in your old PSP to trade in for your PSP Go, e.g. waving the aforementioned handling fee. This makes the customer happy, because psychologically, they’ve got the “You’re fucked, you have to rebuy all your games” in the back of their minds, and comparatively, this is a significantly better deal. Sony is happy, because this encourages more widespread adoption of their PSP Go, which in term decreases piracy rates (because the digital downloads are supposedly much harder to pirate). And GameStop is happy because they essentially get a ton of used stuff (games and old PSPs) for free.

The main flaws with this prediction are as follows:

Assuming Sony wishes to kill off physical media in favor of digital downloads, GameStop is only “happy” in the short term: Sure they get old PSPs and games for free which they can resale at arbitrary markup, but if Sony gets its way, eventually these items will be obsolete, and GameStop won’t be able to sell them at all, except to collectors and bargain hunters. On the other hand, while GameStop may be unhappy with this deal, it may very well be the best they could possibly get from Sony. In fact, the deal is probably a bit unrealistically generous of Sony, and more likely, GameStop won’t get the games for free, but rather receive some massive discount in selling PSP Go game licenses, which they are passing onto the customer. Effectively, the two companies are “splitting” the profits from this insurge of used games. Thus, even if GameStop is unhappy with the deal, they will likely accept it anyway.

Sony claims that they are not killing off physical media, and will continue to support the UMD format that traditional PSPs use. This is what they say, but this strategy doesn’t make much sense to me. Maybe they will be ostensibly supporting UMDs, but in practice no one will use the format anymore, much like Sony’s MiniDisc format.

Finally, Sony (and GameStop) are not particularly well known for loving their customers. Although my proposed solution may make all three parties happy, they may decide instead to settle for making only two of them happy. In all likelihood, even if Sony announced that there was no special program, and you had to rebuy all of your games from scratch, people would actually go ahead and buy.

I think that that last point, corporate greed, is the strongest argument for why they won’t let users upgrade for free, or for a token amount. So my final prediction is that they will do something in between, perhaps offering a 50%-75% discount on buying PSP Go licenses for games if you trade in your physical version of the same product. Unfortunately, I think this is not a “deal” at all, because this is essentially already what GameStop does — buying your used games to offer discount on new games — and so probably the two will pair up on an marketing campaign to make this “deal” sound much sweeter than it actually is.