Ready at Dawn CEO talks up PSP, says online distribution is key
Judging by last week's torrent of PSP headlines, clearly Sony has big plans in store for its handheld in the coming year. One popular rumor making the rounds of late centers on a possible redesign in the works for the portable, one which purports to drop the UMD format altogether. It's an idea that Ready at Dawn boss Didier Malenfant seems wholly in favor of seeing, if only because it looks to point towards a platform dedicated to digital distribution.
The exec admits that he doesn't have the inside track on what Sony is up to with the PSP, though he told Edge in a recent interview that he'd "love to see anything that can help distribution move quicker toward a 100 percent online model." Like Bungie's Marty O'Donnell before him, Malenfant has been feeling the financial crunch put on the industry by the used game market, and confessed that "it's not piracy but used games that are killing us."
Ready at Dawn may have a more personal stake in a possible PSP redesign as well, with rumors of a PSP sequel to God of War: Chains of Olympus in the pipeline at the Irvine, CA studio. Unfortunately, Edge wasn't ably to pry any details out of the company co-founder, with Malenfant saying only that "the PSP was a great platform to work on and it's certainly been really good to us, so we have no complaint there." However, if Ready at Dawn is back to working with the PSP, we suggest maybe holding onto a few of those dev kits after the project is out the door instead of spending all of the company profits on stamps.
