Great news, Sony fans! Sony has just announced a that MAG will be hitting North American retailers on… drum roll please… January 26, 2010.
Zipper and SCEA have stated that they holding an event on September 4th at this year’s PAX Convention, from 6:00 – 9:00 PM PST.
200 PS Blog readers are being invited to attend the 256-player function, with direct hands-on with the game and a new MAG map. All you have to do is RSVP over on the US PS Blog page.
Hit the link if you fancy your chances!
Rockstar Games has announced that GTA: Chinatown Wars is on its way towards the PSP as both a downloadable title and in UMD format. Apparently the game was so successful on the DS they decided to port it.
“We’re proud to extend this truly unique handheld Grand Theft Auto experience to PSP and offer a downloadable version of Chinatown Wars for PSP Go!,” said Rockstar boss Sam Houser.
“Rockstar Leeds has shown incredible talent in creating games that raise the bar in terms of depth and innovation on portables, and with Chinatown Wars we have a rich, fast-paced, and incredibly addictive entry into the series.”
CEO of Sony America, Jack Tretton, was equally delighted with the news: “Rockstar’s work with the GTA series has been an enormous part of the success of PlayStation platforms.”
“We’re excited to welcome the critically acclaimed Chinatown Wars to the outstanding line-up of great games headed to the PSP platform this fall.”
It will probably sell better than the DS version.
Talking frankly in a interview with Gamasutra recently, SCEA’s Peter Dille admitted openly to the impact that piracy has had on the PSP and the developers who attempt to release games on the format.
“I’m convinced and we’re convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP,” Dille told Gamasutra.
“It’s been a problem that the industry has to address together; it’s one that I think the industry takes very seriously, but we need to do something to address this because it’s criminal what’s going on, quite frankly.”
“It’s not good for us, but it’s not good for the development community,” he added. “We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it’s frankly sickening.”
In order to play their Sony games online, participate in Home, buy games from the PlayStation Store, subscribe to a game, etc. gamers will now have to agree to a new set of terms and conditions. The company sent out the amendments to its customers last week, outlining a slew of new, and questionable, regulations regarding use of this product.
In the changed “Code of Conduct” players are unable to reveal their indentifying information (such as name, address or name or address of someone else or of a business, etc.). However, this same provision does not work in reverse—Sony explicitly stated that they could use gamers’ information for the purposes of advertisement. It’s unclear if this advertisement is strictly for Sony’s use or for them to also sell this to third parties to use.
There’s no denying that right now, the PSP is a malnourished machine when it comes to new titles, despite some major heavy-hitters on the format. SCEA’s John Koller has promised, in a recent interview with Edge Online, that this trend wouldn’t continue into 2009
“I think going into next year we’re going to see significant growth,” he said. “We’re counseling retail to be ready for it.
We have a number of very strong franchise games on the docket that will be launching next year. We haven’t gone public with those, and many third-parties have not yet either because they’re concentrating on holiday, but we have a number of very strong titles coming.”
“When we launched the PSP it launched at a 28-year old, heavily male, New York subway [demographic], and that slowly trended down. Now we’re in the mid-teens with a lot of tracking even younger than that,” Koller added.
“Our research shows that in the next 12 months young moms actually are set to have the highest propensity to purchase the hardware and software for their young children.”
Encouraging yet strangely worrying at the same thing.
