Sony Are Beginning To Market The PSP At A Younger Audience.

Games such as Grand Theft Auto and Wipeout helped push Sony away from the traditionally child-like audiences of the Nintendo handhelds.

While Nintendo's gone on to sell a ridiculous number of Nintendo DS', the PlayStation Portables actually been a big success. But there are hints that the device is now nearing the end of its life.

Peter Dille has told The [A]List Daily that the platform holder are now gunning for a younger audience with their handheld.

“That’s part and parcel with the strategy as you go longer into the lifecycle,” he said. “With quality game experiences for $9.99, we’re talking in a way that none of our competitors can on all of our platforms.

“On the PS3, the PlayStation Move lets us talk to more casual gamers and at the same time we’re introducing 3D games. On the PSP, we’re pitching something that appeals to a younger audience, and we’re also putting out something that appeals to core gamers with titles like Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep.

“If you look at what Sony WWS does, we have titles ranging from Killzone to EyePet. PlayStation is a very big tent and we’ve never been reliant on one product genre like one of our competitors and it’s helped us sell 377 million PlayStation hardware products and two billion software products in 15 years.”

The strategy and method seems absolutely fine, but the PlayStation Portable could really do with a price-drop at some point to capture that younger western audience. We've always felt that games such as Invizimals and EyePet PSP would be massive successes if they were bundled at "toy" prices. $100 would be magical for PSP if Sony could afford to hit it.

[source vg247.com]