PSP doomed from the get-go

The studio behind one of the PSP’s biggest recent releases has claimed that Sony’s portable machine was destined to fail from the very start.

It was the first portable that Sony released – it’s a trial by fire,” Ru Weerasuriya, the co-founder of God of War: Ghost of Sparta developer Ready at Dawn, told Edge (as reported by CVG).

It’s a good platform and you can make amazing things on it. I think that we’ve tried as much as possible to prove that in the last seven years. But it was doomed from the beginning, that’s its biggest problem.

It was doomed from the very get-go. There are some things that aren’t conductive to calling it a true portable gaming platform and calling it a connective platform, although it has wi-fi. There’s so many things that publishers and the manufacturer and Sony dropped the ball on – it’s natural, it’s the first one.”

Take a moment, though, to put the PSP into context. Its time on the market is undoubtedly up, but to date the machine has sold in excess of 60m units. That puts it on par with the NES, and is far ahead of machines such as the Xbox 360, PS3, N64, Mega Drive, SNES and GameCube.

Despite the numbers, it’s not the first time that the high-profile PSP developer has hit out at the machine. Last month Weerasuriya said that piracy on the machine is so bad that it’s getting to the point where it doesn’t make sense to make games on it”.

Of course, the postscript to all of this is that Sony is a fair along the line with the development of the PSPs first real successor, the first pictures of which were posted online earlier this week.

And don’t forget the PlayStation Phone that’s currently being tested at Sony Ericsson.