PSP Minis Will Lack Multiplayer, Updates, DLC for Expediency

Speaking to Gamasutra at GDC Austin, SCEA’s senior account manager, Justin Cooney brought some new info to light about the upcoming PSP Minis. The smaller downloadable games, which many point to as being Sony’s answer to the type of titles being offered on iPhone and iPod Touch, won’t bear many of the same features of their perceived competition – namely wi-fi multiplayer, DLC and software update support.

Why would this be? According to Cooney, it’s for expediency’s sake. Specifically, speeding up the approval process.

“When you look at it from a testing perspective, you have to do more QA. [Allowing those features] would defeat the purpose of having a dedicated service for smaller content. It increases the barriers,” said Cooney.

Stating that the QA timeframe for a Mini averages from three to five days, as opposed to up to two weeks for a full PSP title, Cooney says that stripping these features streamlines the process.

“From our perspective, if we’re going to reduce the time it takes to get through our internal process, it helps that we don’t have to check multiplayer features,” he said.

While we can understand the multiplayer component, this also removes one of the biggest perceived assets that the iTunes App Store enjoys – the ability for developers to push out software updates (and free additional content) without waiting. Although the App Store is obviously far more of an unregulated frontier than Sony would want PlayStation Network being, one has to wonder if this will curtail indie game developers from porting their iPhone hits to PSP. What are your thoughts on the subject?

[Via: Gamasutra]

Tags: iPhone iPod Touch Minis PlayStation Network PSP Go Sony