UMD Passport not coming to North America
- Posted February 7th, 2012 at 16:21 EDT by Don Oliveira
- 7 Comments
The UMD passport program--used to transfer PSP UMDs to the Vita at a discounted price--will not be making its way to North America, as today confirmed by Sony to Kotaku.
Having been a thing in Japan since the official Vita launch, the UMD passport program allowed Japanese gamers to register their UMDs to their respective PlayStation Network (or Sony Entertainment Network, rather) accounts, which would in turn give the owner of said UMD a discount on the digital version of that same game.
Admittedly, however, there was never a firm pricing structure for the UMD Passport program meaning that publishers are able to charge however much they want for the digital version of their game. This caused a bunch of pricing discrepancies where there shouldn’t be, so all in all, we’re not sure if this is a feature we’d use too often even if it did come here. It is a shame to see that it won’t even be an option in North America, though.
The Vita will be launching in the west on February 22.
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Tim Nunes
- 6:38pm EST - February 7th, 2012
- 3
This really is a load of hogwash. Sure, the PSP wasn't a big deal, and more games were made for the PSP that were Japanese-only, but a massive consumer base is across the ocean from Japan as well. I can relate, based on statistics, that, by pure gestimation, only around 8% of Americans would use this feature. Still, hosting these items on the PSN gives Sony revenue, and consumers spending money on them will give developers money for not making anything new completely convenient.
Financially, it's probably a good move. But, unlike the whole "Voice chat" debacle, Sony shouldn't have come right out and said that the feature wasn't coming. Like the whole thing with voice chat, let the consumers forget about it instead of tattering our dreams. We spent years justifying ourselves for having a console that only let us communicate with dedicated chats or passively through what games provided.
Though, this went in a totally different direction, the premise is the same. We have hoped for a long time for companies like Square-Enix to put their games on the network, such as Kingdom Hearts, and the UMD Passport gave us the hope that the PlayStation brand deserved. Statistically, it's really not a big deal to most people, much like removing the OS feature on the PS3, but money comes and goes with these things. Phones function off of the same premise of microtransactions, and having small purchases frequent over millions of customers still makes for a lot of money. Especially when effort isn't needed to make a new product, such as with the UMD Passport.
I'm still excited profusely for the Vita for its own reasons, but this makes me a very sad fanboy.
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Chaoticblaze |
Chaoticblaze27- 6:41pm EST - February 7th, 2012
- 4
'm Okay With It for 2 Reasons There Not Required To Port Your Games & If you wanna play your psp games that you already own then play them on your Psp problem solved? which is why i also never complaned about the PS3 Slim not being Backwards Capable To Play my Ps2 games
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Alpha2
- 6:53pm EST - February 7th, 2012
- 5
I saw this comming..... From the day they suggested it I said they'd never do this. They tried it in japan which is a much smaller market and it was probably such a totally excessively arduous process that it wasnt worth the effort and costs involved to make it work either that or people ended up trying to break the system and get free games either by barrowing UMDs from friends or buying used games at cheap prices that are well below the prices of the actual games in the online store.
But I said itbefore, if you have the UMD PSP just get a tv out cable and hook it up to your TV as a mini home console, it's a far better use for the PSP and it's games then trying to port the games over.
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TheTenth666
- 1:30pm EST - February 8th, 2012
- 7
"at a discounted price" shouldn't be in this phrase, my brain does not understand, i paid already for these games
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