PSP Online Store 6 to 8 Months Out

The long-promised, oft-delayed online store for Sony's PSP won't debut for at least another six months, SCEA senior PSP marketing manager John Koller told MTV's Stephen Totilo. Back in May, SCEA president Jack Tretton expressed hope that the PSP-based service for downloadable games, demos, and video would arrive this year. "I think the advent of a long awaited and quite frankly long overdue ability to deliver a downloadable service for the PSP will help us out a great deal," he admitted at SCEA's Gamers Day Event. "Hopefully we'll have it out there by the fall." Koller attributes the holdup to issues stemming from the always-pesky digital rights management, which he estimates may take between six and eight months to resolve. However, he did confirm that a number of original downloadable PSP games are currently in development, promising that "the PSP ones are equally as good [as current PlayStation 3 downloadable titles] and made for a portable." One such example of a title originally planned for PSP's online store is SCE Japan Studio's echochrome, based on Jun Fujiki's PC freeware OLE Coordinate System. "It was initially going to be a download-service-only game," Koller said of the title, which will also be made available for PlayStation 3 via the console's online PlayStation Store. "We changed it to a UMD because it's a very rich game. That's where their mind is. They're developing that kind of game." Koller noted all future first-party PSP titles will make full use of the system's recently unlocked CPU. The hardware manufacturer also hopes to provide certain elements of SCE London Studio's PlayStation 3 social networking world Home on the PSP and may possibly design a PS3 game that could be played from either the console itself or via the PSP's Remote Play functionality.