Sony recently announced their new PSP system, the PSP Go, which has a sliding screen and internal flash memory without a UMD drive. This means that all your UMD games will be rendered unplayable on your new PSP Go.
Gizmodo spoke to John Koller, Sony’s Director of Hardware Marketing about this setback, and found out that Sony has a solution to this problem. Apparently Sony is in the process of putting together a program which will let you play your UMD games on the PSP Go, in digital format.
“We’re in the midst of putting together a good will program,” he said. “We’ll be unveiling that soon [because] we actually think there’s a significant group that will be upgrading from the 1000…In the past, we’ve seen a 20-25% trade-up factor, and I assume that’s going to be the case here. We’ve modeled that. So we’re looking at a good-will program – a short term good-will program that would continue for years afterward.”
Koller also suggested that the program would be similar to the Portable Copy feature, which lets users rip Blu-ray movies on their PS3s to watch on their PSPs, but emphasized that users would not be ripping their UMDs. Although he didn’t say how exactly this program would work.