Ex-PlayStation Boss: Nintendo Dev's 3-Word Reaction to PSP Reveal

Ever wonder what it was like inside the console wars when Sony dropped the PSP bomb on Nintendo? Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden just shared a hilarious anecdote that perfectly captures the tension.

In an interview with The Expansion Pass, Layden recalled showing off the first PSP back in the early 2000s. "I had a friend who was working at Nintendo, and he sent me a text message saying, 'You bastards,'" Layden said. "I said, 'Hey, bro, you know, it's all fun and games.'" At the time, Nintendo was the undisputed king of handhelds, with the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance having sold hundreds of millions of units. No one else dared enter that space—until Sony did.

Nintendo ultimately struck back with the DS, which took a radical new direction with dual screens and a touch interface. It reached a wider, more casual audience and sold over 154 million units by the end of its life. The PSP's 76 million units might look small next to that, but it's still the biggest sales number any non-Nintendo handheld has ever achieved. However, rampant piracy made it tough for Sony to sell games. "PSP did reasonably well, but then the OS got hacked and you could jailbreak it pretty easily," Layden admitted. The platform's savior was Monster Hunter, whose co-op focus had players across Japan convincing friends to buy their own consoles and copies to join the hunt.

With rumors of a PS6 handheld heating up, Layden warns that Sony has always struggled to market two platforms at once. "PS3 was a struggle, but PSP was very successful. Then Vita came out and that was doing well, but then PS3 got itself into a better place," he explained. "You only have so many marketing dollars and so you're trying to put them against different products." He suggests that if Sony does get back into handhelds, it might almost set up a different company to focus solely on that, rather than splitting one marketing budget between a handheld, a console, and software.

That might have been true in the PSP and Vita era, when handhelds got different games than consoles. But today, successful platforms like Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch promise you can take your exact same home gaming experiences on the road. In that regard, PSP and Vita might have been a little too ahead of their time. "With Vita, we thought we're going to bring a console experience into your handheld... When we looked back when the smoke cleared, I realized that no, people just want a good handheld experience on their handheld," Layden said. "They don't want to replicate a console experience, necessarily."

You can see that borne out in Steam Deck's top played charts—sure, you'll find Witcher 3 and Diablo 4, but handheld-friendly games like The Binding of Isaac and Balatro show up way more than they do on the main Steam charts. "I think the company needs to really decide what it wants to be before it makes a decision to fire up another platform," Layden concluded.

So, what do you think? Should Sony give handhelds another shot, or is it better off focusing on the PS5 and beyond? Let us know in the comments!