PSP2 (NGP) Weekly Roundup and Outlook

After the giddy mayhem of last week's unveiling, the PSP2 pace has dropped off a little. But, now comes the serious effort of thousands of coders getting to grips with a new console - which is where most of the next batch of news will come from. And the good news is that Sony has made things very easy indeed for those coders.

And where there are happy coders will come great games; games where they don't have to worry about conserving CPU cycles, because the PSP2 is has it in bags, and games where they don't have to create everything from scratch because they can reuse PS3-class engines and graphics and convert them for immediate use on the PSP2.

We've already seen who's developing the big franchises, but we now know there are 20 UK development houses starting their PSP2 adventures and you can expect roughly 60-80 (just based on relative sizes) US houses will be doing the same very soon. Sure, not all will have projects coming to fruition, some will go bust on the way, but there should be around 50-60 games ready to launch within the first year of the PSP2's life.

I don't know the figure was for the PSP but it wasn't that high. There will also be a massive wave of continental European houses, new Asian nation's devs starting to create and if there are any Latin American houses, please let me know.

The original PSP was born with big games on the small screen in mind, but we now live in a world where little games can also play a big part and PSP2 is ready for that market too. Sony seem to have recognised a lot of the problems that PSP had and has addressed them. There will be the odd screw-up along the way, this is Sony after all.

But, from this early in the life cycle, it looks like we could get a premium console experience at a reasonable price, with all the games any system ever needed. As for the existing PSP, there are still games being made and with Sony still predicting it'll sell 8 million consoles over this financial year (up to April) there are still enough buyers to make it a viable proposition, for a little while yet.