Sony Still in Denial Regarding PSP 2 Leak

It’s almost like it’s trying to tell us something

By now, everybody on the entire internet must have heard that the PSP 2 exists, it’s in the hands of developers, and it “looks like it’s a pretty powerful machine,” according to Mortal Kombat developer Netherrealm Studios. For some reason, though, Sony still refuses to comment.

We’ve been expecting the successor to Sony’s perpetual silver medalist handheld for a while, though when it failed to make an appearance at E3, a lot of people probably stopped caring. And Sony still won’t talk about the PSP 2. How long will it be before we all lose interest?

One thing that these companies need to learn if they’re ever going to gain the trust of consumers is that honesty is the best policy. When the cat’s out of the bag, they can’t stuff it back in. They can take the cat into their homes and nurture it to health, feeding it milk from a bottle and treating it like their own, or they can abandon it to the cruelties of the outside world.

Cat analogies aside, it doesn’t do Sony any credit when everyone knows the PSP 2 exists and is in the hands of developers and their only response is the typical, cryptic “no comment.” What are they waiting for, anyway? The 3DS has been announced for months; we’re even expecting to have it in our hands shortly.

Take Harmonix’s response when the Rock Band 3 set list was leaked online some time ago. Instead of refusing to comment or issuing some doublespeak PR mumbo jumbo, they uploaded a tongue-in-cheek video with the full, leaked set list clearly visible in the background.

Should more companies take this approach? Absolutely. We already know Sony has no idea how to handle the launch of a new product – just look at the botched jobs they did on the PS2 and the PS3. Now it looks like they have no sense of humor, either.

No one would be happier than me if the PSP 2 turned out to be the greatest gift to gamers since the analog stick. The fact that they’re so reticent to even acknowledge its existence, though, implicates the opposite. Let’s hope all this secrecy affords them the time to come up with something that can compete with the 3DS, or we might have a handheld monopoly on our hands.