Sony Never Liked UMD
posted Saturday Jul 11, 2009 by Scott Ertz
Remember when Sony lost the lawsuit over the rumble feature in their controllers, and they said that they didn't plan on having a DualShock3 controller, and then when the lawsuit was finalized they brought it out anyway? Well, Sony is having another "we were just kidding" moment with UMD. Naoya Matsui, product planning leader for Sony, said in an interview:
We'd planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning. But if we'd simply released the hardware, there wouldn't have been much for everyone to enjoy. We needed to prepare the right environment for it first - things like the transferral of content with the PS3 and PSN, and PC software to manage content like music and movies such as Media Go.
So, what happened to all the hype over UMD when Sony first launched it? Didn't they say it was going to be the next big thing in media formats? I certainly understand the idea of moving from a medium to digital distribution. It makes the process much quicker to release a game, the entire chain becomes cheaper with time, but I feel cheated when they come out and say they never planned on keeping UMD. What do you guys think?
