The Seattle Times interviewed Xbox Chief Robbie Bach and questioned him on his thoughts of the new gaming handhelds from Sony and Nintendo. Below is an excerpt.
Q. Sony's PSP game device could compete with the Portable Media Center Microsoft is launching later this year. How do you see it playing out?
A. Well I think the PSP is an interesting product because really what Sony's doing is they've decided to go compete with everybody. It competes with the iPod. It's going to compete with Portable Media Center, which isn't just Microsoft, it's Microsoft plus all the hardware partners who are supporting that. It's going to compete with Game Boy SP, Game Boy DS. They've really taken on Microsoft, Nokia at some level, Apple, it's pretty ambitious.
On the Portable Media Center side we're very focused on the things that we know go together, and that we can create a device that's compelling at the right price point for music and movies, with the right storage media, with the right model for enabling people to get movies to it easily, all those kinds of things.
PSP, they run the risk of trying to be a little bit of all things to all people and then end up being great for a small audience.Movies to get to the PSP are going to have to be in a proprietary format, so how's that going to happen? Am I going to buy my movies a second time? I don't know. People look at durability. It's got a beautiful screen on it, but is that going to survive the rough-and-tumble world of a portable device. So I think they have some real interesting product ideas but some real challenges, and creating an all-in-one device is hard.
I think their experience with PSX in Japan would point that out. They have this device that's a PS2 plus a DVD player plus a DVD recorder plus a few other things. And I think their early feedback on that is it hasn't sold very well because people aren't sure what it is. I think PSP certainly is going to have that challenge. And I'll tell you, Nintendo will put up a very impressive fight. This is the heart and soul of the company. And we all know Apple knows how to compete. So it will be interesting.