Sony Says UMD Is Staying Around
The UMD has been met with mixed responses from the gaming community. PSP owners have had to deal with some game-ruining loading times on a handful of titles and UMD movies have not caught on as Sony originally intended with the format. With memory sticks becoming larger and cheaper, there have been mumblings of ditching the format to load games and movies directly from a memory stick. Feature-length video playback is possible on the stick, so gaming seems to be the next logical step. Speaking with Pocket Gamer, PSP senior marketing manager John Koller has denied any suggestions that Sony will drop the format.
"The future of UMD is bright… We'll never walk away from our base. Whether it's movies or game content, third parties have an incredible opportunity to utilize it.”
There are also strengths to the format. It is next to impossible to scratch with only a small window with which to harm the encased disk. UMDs can hold up to 1.5GB of storage space compared to the Nintendo DS cartridges, which can only hold up to 128MB. For a portable that uses a disk medium, it’s a well-designed format. The ability to cut down on the lengthy loading times relies on the developers. A crafty programmer can cut down the loading times considerably. The issue lies with developers who rush a game out, be it a port or an original title, without considering load times as an important factor of development.
More gamers are interested in direct digital transfer of media, so the future of the format may be a little shaky. In a matter of two years at least, physical memory will be really cheap. It will be hard to deny the fact that it would be faster to transfer and load games from a solid-state memory, than it would to read the data off of an optical disk. Who knows, maybe the PSP 2 will have no media tray at all.
We'll never walk away from UMD, says Sony's John Koller[Pocket Gamer]
Toots
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 5 July 2007
· Comments (3)
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If a UMD holds 1.5GB wouldn't that mean we'd need like ten memory sticks to maintain our game collections. I mean don't get me wrong, digital distribution may be the more efficient means of loading. I love my PSN PSone games. But there's still a lot of importance attached to physical mediums of storing content specifically and permanently. Sony will probably shift towards digital distribution but the UMD is definitly still important.
I have encountered problems with the casings for these UMD discs. Sure, placing them in plastic cases does protect them and such, but I have encountered occasions when the clear part of the plastic cover or the metal thing in the middle popped out of place, rendering the UMD unusable in my PSP system.
Anyway, those defects aside, the UMD is definitely innovative. I see a bright future for it on the PSP and future game systems developed by SONY, although it is better used for games and software than for movies and music.
Its ridiculous how easy those things are to damage...