Just a few days ago I wrote an article about Sony’s PSPGo, and some suggestions on how to improve sales.

Now they have made an announcement that I think shows their hand pretty clearly.

As the report goes, Sony are offering ten free games to anyone in the EU who has registered their PSP after April 1st (despite the unfortunate date it isn’t a joke).

The ten games are:

• Gran Turismo
• LittleBigPlanet
• MotorStorm Arctic Edge
• Wipeout Pure
• Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice
• FIFA World Cup 2010
• Need for Speed: Shift
• Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
• Assassins Creed: Blood Lines
• and one other game they haven’t confirmed.

This is a great deal for new buyers as the list of titles does a good job of covering the bases and includes some of the platform’s best (I would expect something like God of War: Chains of Olympus to fill the space as the final title).

So, Sony are desperately trying to temp new buyers but without wanting to lower the sale price of the unit (which I’m guessing they think would appear to be more clearly accepting defeat). At the same time they are offering nothing new to the people who have already bought a PSPGo, so their strategy is not one of providing further lasting value to existing customers.

This suggests to me that their current plan is purely to shift stock and empty out warehouses of existing PSPGo units to make way for something new. Almost certainly the PSP2.

I would expect PSPGo stock to be steadily declining from now on as production slows down.

To paraphrase the song “What the Xbox needs now, is love sweet love”. Or, bright colours and fun platform games. Actually that song quote is almost entirely unsuitable for this article. Oh well, it’s written now and there’s no way to delete characters.

Anyway, thank heavens that Insomniac (purveyors of the insanely good Ratchet & Clank series) have decided to go multi-platform today. I mean, it’s not particularly beneficial to me, as I have a PS3, but I can only see it being a good thing for the two parties involved.

Firstly, Insomniac get a wider audience. Their games sell reasonably well anyway, as far as I can tell, but having more potential customers is never going to be a bad thing. They also get the freedom to create a new IP. Although I love R&C, as a series it’s getting a little long in the tooth, and this is starting to show. Flexing their creative muscles on something entirely new is sure to fire up the staff.

Technology-wise they already have a PS3 engine that is more than capable of doing the business. As numerous face offs will attest, this is the harder format to get a multi-platform release shining on, so their engine programmers can focus on the “easier” task ahead.

From Microsoft’s point of view, they have the potential to get a great family-friendly bow in their arrow. Assuming, that is, Insomniac head down the Spyro / Ratchet & Clank line of their past, rather than looking towards Resistance – though given the amount of competition muddy-looking FPS games have on the Xbox I think they would be mad not to.

MS have frequently tried to relaunch the 360 as a family system, yet there is a noticable lack of bright and cheery cartoon-ish games in the catalogue. The only ones that springs to mind are by Rare – the pretty but otherwise dull launch title, Kameo, and the Pokemon-aping but confusing Viva Pinata.

Of course, the final party that benefits here is EA, as they have signed the publishing deal. Which is interesting in itself – after signing with Respawn less than a month ago, they are doing a good job of partnering with strong 3rd party developers. Is this a sign of things to come, and will they be making more use of the EA Partners Program, rather than acquiring developers?

Just a quick update today, to give you something that will hopefully make your life a little sweeter. You probably think it’s going to be a game, doesn’t it? It definitely has a gamey name. But this blog is only mainly about games. Not always.

The Invisible Hand is a web browser plug in that shows a discreet notification (think of the “do you want that password saved?” bars that come up in Chrome or Fixefox) when you’re browsing an item in an online shop and it can be found elsewhere for a lower price.

If you buy a lot of games (or music, or DVDs, or electronics) online then this lovely little plug in will almost certainly save you some cash. I’ve been running it for the last month or so and it’s helped me get a better deal quite a few times.

Go to http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/ to download it (though only if you use Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer. And only if you live in the US, UK, or Germany).

Free things that save you money – what’s not to like?

This post was originally drafted up a couple of months ago, when it was called “How to save the PSPGo”. After having a bit of a think though, it seems unlikely that such a chance exists. So I changed the title to better reflect my take on the situation.

So anyway, the PSPGo. A great idea for a product, absolutely wasted on the product itself.

It must have sounded so good. Take the PSP, with its decent catalogue of titles, and make it smaller, lighter, and get rid of that crappy UMD drive that everyone has always complained about and has increased the loading times of games. You also keep all of its media playing capabilities, and its theoretically great links to the PS3 (though I’m not sure how many people actually use that stuff to play their games on the other side of the world).

The actual hardware of a PSPGo is small and lovely – it’s only slightly bigger than an iPhone, and I’m pretty sure it’s smaller than my DSi – and is an improvement in every way over the previous PSP models. It’s very comfortable to hold, has a decent battery life and the load times are shorter than before (though still strangely long on some games).

But the public never warmed to the PSPGo. Admittedly it was released at a time when the PSP had already been on a steady decline, with new releases becoming rarer and rarer (due in some part to developers being scared off by poor sales. It’s sort of a vicious downward cycle).

How could Sony save some face with the PSPGo, and possibly allow it some sort of Indian Summer?

Firstly, drop the price. It was always overpriced, but there is the argument that a high price affords an item a more desirable status. However, it’s pretty clear at this point that the thing is never going to sell gangbusters. You could still improve sales by dropping £75 off the RRP, lowering it closer to an impulse buy for gadget fans. Especially in the face of the (almost certainly true) rumours that a PSP2 is just around the corner, keeping it at the launch RRP seems foolish.

Release more back catalogue titles onto the PSN store. As publishers are apparently reluctant to persue this themselves, they may need some slight financial incentive – so Sony should be offering deals of one off payments per title released. At the end of the day Sony will make this money back in their cut of the game’s sale.

In particular they should be targeting the games that are regarded as big PSP classics, such as Lumines, that currently aren’t available due to licensing issues. Licensing issues almost always can be made to go away with the application of money. While they are looking at the store, work on getting more games released to more stores. With digital distribution there shouldn’t be so many titles locked to one store or another, and currently some territories look very bare in comparison to others.

Scrap the weekly releases. I don’t understand this at all, unless it is an attempt to make the week’s releases look impressive by bundling them together into one update as opposed to spreading them out. But as a customer, I would like games and DLC as soon as possible. Checking the online store is no particular inconvenience to me, unlike trekking into town to go to the nearest game retailer, so I don’t mind doing it multiple times a week. This would also benefit developers slightly, as customers are more likely to buy for small amounts more frequently, rather than splurge a large amount on a number of games on the same day. Developers shouldn’t have to compete with each other for money once a week.

Sony could also enforce a better pricing scheme. Honestly there are so many games that are hugely overpriced it’s just not even funny any more. Who pays £31 for a PSP game? And the pricing differences between regional stores is ludicrous too (Prinny – Can I Really Be The Hero was twice as expensive on the UK store as the US one, for example). Thankfully this seems to be on the mend – or it may just be a one off case of good fortun – as ModNation Racers has released at £16.99 on PSN, compared to the UMD version’s RRP of £24.99. Even taking into account the immediate discounting of online retailers, the downloadable release is still a pound (a pound!) cheaper.

Finally I would recommend that Sony force developers to create the downloadable version of any future PSP titles for simultaneous release with the UMD version. This should be part of submission, with both versions required. Players should not be further inconvenienced and disappointed as titles they are anticipating and want to spend money on are delayed, or not released at all, on their PSPGo.

Playing Call of Duty: World at War (as always, I am ahead of the curve when it comes to playing the most recent releases), and right in the first level I am confused.

I have just been rescued from what seems sure to have been a fairly horrible death, and along with my rescuers am wreaking shooty havoc on my former captors.

One of the incidental soundbites that one of my new chums keeps shouting through the incessant gunfire is “Keep behind me!”

Unfortunately, if I were to work out which identikit soldier he is and then did as he said the level progress would grind to a halt. This particular level is driven forward by my own progress – with my allies not moving forward until I hit each individual trigger box.

So, today’s bad idea is having flavour speech that contradicts what the player actually has to do.

Fallout 3 has easily 20 hours of gameplay. For most people it would be around the 50 hour mark. I think I clocked up around 80, almost obsessively hoovering up the various side-plots and locations.

Obviously I would say that I got my money’s worth for the £40 I paid for the game – about 50 pence per hour is good value entertainment by anyone’s standards.

But what about a game that offers only 20 hours of entertainment for my £40? Is that still good value? Many modern shooters have single player storylines that last 10 hours, at the most.

I will freely admit to being a little worried about the size of games. And not as a developer, but as a player. As I get on further in life I am finding myself with less and less spare time to devote to playing (this sad state of affairs should be a blog post in itself I guess, if Richard Herring can write an entire book about being a man-child).

And when I recently played Battlefield Bad Company 2, the difficulty selection screen gave me something of an epiphany. “Content tourist” was one of the options (for the easiest difficulty level, of course). That’s my entire game-playing style condensed down to two words.

I like to see all of the broad strokes that a game has to offer – each level location, the range of weapons or cars, what enemies it contains, and the gameplay elements – and I like to do it with the minimum amount of frustration that still offers some feeling of achievement in progression.

What I am wondering now, is are we being too clever for our own good with the various methods being employed to keep a player playing one game? Character investment is a great way of making multiplayer feel less zero-sum and keep people playing your game rather than those of your competitors, but at the same time is it stopping them from buying more of your own as well?

As impressive as Modern Warfare 2′s sales figures are, would it have sold more if its potential audience wasn’t still playing Call of Duty 4 and World at War as well?

Would we sell more copies if we made shorter games, and sold them for a lower cost?

To go back to the start of this article, by the time I had finished my 80 hours of Fallout 3 I had well and truly had my fill of that world, and never bought any of the DLC. I’m also not terribly interested in the upcoming New Vegas sequel. I can’t help but think I would have been a buyer of these if I hadn’t overdosed on the original game.

Well it seems a little pointless to regurgitate the sordid details of the whole Activision / Infinity Ward / Respawn love-hate triangle, so I’m not going to bother. Especially since a lot of the details floating around the internet seem to be little more than conjecture.

What I will do is point out two things that have really stood out to me during the last few weeks.

Firstly, although this has been the talk of the industry for weeks, it appears to have made little to no impact on any “proper” news sites. This suggests to me that the world at large couldn’t give two hoots. Can you imagine it not being news if Spielberg got kicked out of Dreamworks? Developers may have their logos in front of a game, but they are still pretty much faceless.

The other thing I found interesting is that Activision’s share price has not taken a particularly brutal hit throughout the whole ordeal. Shareholders clearly still have confidence in Activision, Treyarch, Sledgehammer etc. to produce the goods.

Whether this confidence turns out to be misplaced is yet to be seen.

Or so they say – helpfully for me I’ve had both. Well, less of the resting. It turns out that selling houses and moving and changing jobs is all rather stressful.

And now that I’ve finally persuaded the various telecoms companies in the UK to play ball and sort me out with both a telephone and broadband access, I’m able to update this blog again. Just as well that nothing even vaguely big has happened in the last four weeks or I would have missed it.

Let’s hope that when I press that publish button this all still works, eh?