“There is absolutely a 10-year life cycle for PSP”, says Koller

By Stephany Nunneley

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SCEA’s John Koller has said that as far as platform life cycles are concerned, PSP will “absolutely” be around for 10-years.

Speaking with Joystiq in a video interview, Koller said that the handheld sector is a very important, and Sony will be in the business “as long as it’s in thePlayStation business”.

“There is absolutely a 10-year life cycle for PSP, and probably more,” he said. “We’ve talked about ‘We’ll be in the PSP business as long as we’re in the PlayStation business’, because we absolutely believe in handheld.

“Unequivocally we think it’s a fantastic place to be, and I can tell you that I think my group particularly – the hardware group – fully believes in handheld because there’s different demographics that you can touch and bring in to the PlayStation world through it that you may not always be able to do through other avenues.

“You can touch older females, older males, younger children, you can kind of piece all of these different target audiences and demographics under a handheld umbrella much more seamlessly.

“I think it’s a long term opportunity and we will stay in it. Now in terms of where we are in the current life cycle, I think we’re just kind of hitting our stride. We just announced that we hit 60 million units worldwide, which is a very good number for PSP, we’ve got a lot of good development support.

“We always say a platform will turn off when the development spicket turns off. We’ve got 70 games coming this year, we’ve got 70-80 coming next year – it’s just a very healthy platform.

“I don’t think we’d be spending investment to the tune that we are without full belief that this is a go-forward platform.”

Speaking of PSP, rumors before E3 had Sony working on a PSP2 and set for reveal, but SCEE’s Andrew House put those rumors to boot when he spoke to VG247 at the event this week.

He did, however admit that Sony had underestimated gamers’ attachment to physical formats when it came to PSPgo vs PSP.

More through the links.

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