That's why I said I agreed with your second point. Piracy is just irrelevant this conversation, and I didn't want you trying to turn it into a scapegoat.

That I agree with your second point is specifically why they should be hyping the upcoming PSP titles more, instead of focusing on Move and all this other ancillary stuff. If they don't change things soon, there's not much point in them making a PSP2 at all.

Piracy is a real issue in these matters. Maybe not an immediate or particularly relevant issue, but it is an industry talking point. It may not be the reason something won't happen, but you know they'll list it. I'm not saying that them doing so is actually valid.

To be honest, Sony doesn't actually need to have a handheld console. They don't even actually need to have a console period. They have other electronics that are quite frankly much more profitable and they're still selling every PS3 at a loss as far as I know. Nintendo doesn't have that, so having popular consoles is much more important. Sony may as well NOT make a PSP2 if the PSP is any indication of how well it'll do. Dead out the door and slowly gaining weight as you keep it on a respirator and funnel sustenance into its gullet is not a good business model.

Blues, piracy = scapegoat.

Ignore that and keep talking about the good points about a PSP. If we need another discussion on piracy, so be it. Just not in here.

So far I haven't heard anything I'm terribly interested in, and am kind of pissed at Valve for canceling some Portal 2 event for some crappy announcement that Portal 2 will be on the PS3. Wow, what a game changer :rolleyes:

Blue the PSP is region free for games, there's no region to break. What was broken was the restriction on running unsigned code. I think now that Sony have crippled (but not stopped entirely) the piracy scene for the PSP the PSP will become a more attractive prospect for developers, but I just don't see it lasting much longer when the 3DS hits.

So I was right in the first place? Make up your minds, people!

At any rate, even though the PSP is a better prospect now, it still makes no sense to make a new system just as the old one is finally getting off the ground.

If it does get killed by the 3DS, it would just mean the handheld market is not a good choice for Sony to pursue, which there's currently a lot of indication of in the first place.

Last I heard it was like 6 cents for every dollar, so they are losing 18 bucks for every 300 dollar system or so, and I think that was a year ago? So the loss isn't that large anymore.

But Blues, that's kind of a silly argument. A large company does need to expand into other fields to grow, otherwise it stagnates. Not only that if it focuses in one area only it'll eventually get screwed if that area drys up, screwing the company over. Long term a company will want to broaden out and cover different areas. It helps with the profits eventually(Look at the PS2 for Sony) and then with innovation of it's technology. If a company only did what the NEED to do, none would take a risk and innovation would pretty much die out.

If Nintendo followed your logic of not doing something then they would never have made the Wii, they would have just abandoned the Consoles and stuck with the DS. They had a drop in sales from the SNES to the N64, the N64 and the Gamecube. If they had gone "well our track record is now sucking, lets abandon the Console's now" we'd have no motion control crazyness right now because Xbox and Sony wouldn't have cared about it. Plus, it wasn't a good business to follow a dieing field for them.

If the 3DS or some future revision offers some digital storage for games such as the PSP offers now then it will be my console of 2011 and for the foreseeable future. Please do it, Nintendo. Half the reason people bought flashcarts in the first place is so they could carry their games around in one convenient place, and having a library of 3DS games on the go would be immense. Please embrace online, Nintendo.

Well, it's about time. They started off selling them at a loss of $300 per unit, which is hefty considering that that was roughly half the cost of making them at the time.

The point is that they would never have been able to do it if they weren't already a profitable company in other areas.

Sony DOES have a wide safety net, and one unlikely to die out anytime soon. They still make TV sets, computers, playback/recording machines (i.e. DVD and Blu-Ray players and burners), cameras, camcorders, and probably stuff I'm forgetting. As I said, that's why the PS3 happened in the first place. Arguing that making consoles has helped improve their other technologies just doesn't hold water. They made their consoles out of existing technologies and adapted them to the specific purpose of playing games.

Nintendo, on the other hand, NEEDS to have their consoles. Look at SEGA. SEGA systems always had advanced technology compared to the rest of the market, but it was never all that successful due to poor support. SEGA has since ceased making consoles and focused on developing games, because making consoles was just not worth it. Nintendo is the oldest company in the console market, and while they have plenty of their own titles, those titles are used to support their hardware, which is the model that's kept them going for so long. Maybe, if push comes to shove, they'd be able to follow Atari and SEGA into just developing games for other systems. But so far, their consoles have sold well enough they never had to consider it.

Yes, a look at Gamecube shows that it didn't sell as well as other things. On the other hand, look at what else was going on. They had the Game Boy line to help with that.

If the Wii had been an utter failure, maybe Nintendo WOULD have dropped making consoles and focused on their games. Wii was a fluke, an experiment that by random chance was successful beyond their wildest dreams. Motion control's popularity came out of left field and the market is still turbulent because of the radical change.

The console helped with the Blu-ray technology Blues. Also, the Cell processor didn't exist in any of their other pieces of equipment so they didn't just cobble the PS3 from other things. The point though is that a company does what they feel they need to do. Sony's felt that they required to broaden their market, the PS1 came out of that, then the PS2. The PS3 followed suit. They felt the need to expand into the handheld market because they figure they could make money there, so they did that. They still feel they can make money there due to how successful the DS is they just haven't hit the right thing. Honestly, you saying what a company needs to do comes of as very naive. A company needs to make money. Sony feels that they can end up making more money in those to markets so they wish to do that. A Company also needs to advance themselves or they'll stagnate. Sony feels the gaming market is a direction they can go to advance themselves. so they are going there.

Nintendo had a runaway success in the Hand Held market, they had near 100%. They were losing ground and fast in the Console market. Again, by your logic, all Nintendo really needed to do was stay with the status qua. With how crazy the DS was picking up they could have shrugged and said, lets just release a more advance system like we always do, lets follow the market like we did with the GameCube. They didn't, they felt they wanted to do better as a company so they took a chance and created the Wii. A company needs to advance and change to survive in this world.

MicroSoft never needed to make a console, they could have merely stuck with PC's, but they felt they could make a nice sum of money in the console business. A company does what they feel they need to do to advance themselves and their profit margin.

Maybe Sony see's a chance to make their brand name even more popular and getting customer loyalty from gamers who buy their systems. Got a PS3? Buy a Sony TV. They feel they need to do this because they feel the gaming market is good for their company in the long run. So does Microsoft. So does the guys who are making. So yes, they do feel they need to go with a PSP2 or PS4 if they make those because it will, in their eyes, eventually help them.