How Sony Can Make Their Next Gen Portable A Must Buy

Today, Sony is on the handheld gaming campaign trail, preparing for us to vote with our dollars this fall. Should you buy an NGP — the successor to the PSP — in late 2011?
It depends on whether Sony finally gets its PSP line right, if Sony's prose matches its poetry.

The Promise

This past week, we've seen the new PSP, the NGP, in action. We've seen the specs. We've even been able to imagine the invisible checklist of problems with the original PSP that Sony people must have had handy as they ticked them off and made the NGP:

__ Add Second Analog Stick
__ Get Rid Of Noisy Disc Drive
__ Add Touchscreen To Keep Up With Times
__ Make Sure It Is Smaller Than A Loaf of (French) Bread
__ Improve Wireless Connectivity
__ Add Cameras
__ Throw In At Least One Motion Sensor
__ Oh, And Make Sure It's More Powerful Than Whatever Weird Thing Nintendo Is Making
It's all so wonderful. They even added things we didn't know we needed, like a built-in compass and extra touch panels on the device's backside.

Sony's unveiling of their next big machine was as impressive as… their last one. Their last one happened in 2005, when they showed the world the PlayStation 3, a machine that had a boomerang-shaped controller, output graphics onto two HDTVs at the same time and ran, as those of us who attended the Electronics Entertainment Expo Sony briefing in May of that year saw, the best-looking video games we've still ever seen.

I still recall a reporter who was sitting next to me at the event, during that pre-Wii era when the Xbox 360 had just been impressively revealed. Sony's presentation was thunderous. The reporter later cackled: "Daddy's home." Sony's poetic pitch for the PS3 was wonderful. A year later, they dropped some features from the PS3, changed course in order to offer a more sensibly-shaped controller and finally, oh yeah, revealed the PS3's price: $500-$600. That was Sony's prose, unpleasant as some of it was to read.
Sony's last dream machine struggled for a while. Sony struggled to shave price, Sony struggled to not drop more features, Sony struggled to deliver video games in 2006, 2007 and even in 2008 that matched that 2005 promise. Only recently, has the PS3 proven to be the wonderful machine it had the potential to be, a $300-$400 box that runs the likes of Uncharted 2, Metal Gear Solid 4 and the increasingly stunning Killzone series.
We don't know the prose of Sony's new dream machine yet. We don't know when it's really coming out (already there is some hedging about whether it'll be out for all major markets in 2011). We don't know which games will be out on it. We don't know what it will cost, nor what its games will cost or even how we'll buy them.
We'll get those facts, maybe at E3 in June. PSP gamers ought to hope that Sony's 2011 version of 2005 isn't followed by a Sony recreation of 2006.

The Player's Needs

The NGP won't cost $1000. That's nonsense.

The NGP price will "make sense," or Sony executive Shuehei Yoshida told Kotaku, frightening some of our readers that they are being set up for harsh news.

We hope gamers will be spending under $400 for the NGP. We think Sony could have problems all over again if they can't get down to $300. Yes, their NGP feels like a machine plucked from the future. So did their PSP and so, strictly in terms of its display does the glasses-free 3D Nintendo 3DS.
If Sony has a checklist of PSP flaws and features, surely they also have this list of current prices for the things that will compete with the NGP for gamers' attention:
$130-$170 - DS
$170-$200 - PSP
$200 - Wii
$200-$400 - Xbox 360
$200-$300 iPhone 4 (plus the cost of a phone contract)
$250 - Nintendo 3DS
$300-$400 - PlayStation 3
$500-$700 - iPad with Wi-Fi
$630-$830 - iPad with Wi-Fi and 3G (plus the cost of a service plan)

Maybe the rate at which iPads had flown off store shelves would give Sony confidence to sell the NGP for a full $500, but it's hard to see a new portable gaming machine — even one that runs a beautiful version of Uncharted — costing more than any home console.

At $300, the NGP would still be a tough call for some people, considering the gaming alternatives. At $250, that's when things would get interesting and potentially tough for Nintendo (probably tough for Sony too considering all the expensive technology they're stuffing into the machine.)

Even if we knew the hardware price, we'd still not be able to judge the reality of the NGP without knowing its cost. Nintendo signaled early that its 3DS would be based on the old-school handheld gaming model. As soon as we knew it was running cartridge games, we could imagine people having to spend $30, $40, or $50 per game. On iPhone and iPad, games can be free, cost a buck or even go for as much as $10 for the very kinds of games that the typical Sony gaming crowd loves. (Like this one and this one.)