Editorial: Time For a Mea Culpa

Much like Irrational's Ken Levine on stage tonight, I have to eat some of my own words.  In the wake of the PSN outage, I was an angry, angry PlayStation customer.  My identity was put at risk, I was lied to, and for a while completely ignored.  Then the truth came out, and Sony offered it's apology in the form of their Welcome Back program.  While I still maintain that this program was self serving PR, the complete shocker to even myself is how they actually got my attention again.  Not by the continued apologies, not by the Welcome Back program, but with this:

Yes friends, the NGP was revealed tonight as the PlayStation Vita.  I'm calling it the PSV, because it's nice and short, and still sounds like "PSP".  Astoundingly, it was announced as arriving this holiday season, and at the unbelievably reasonable price of $249 for the Wi-Fi model, and $299 for the AT&T 3G equipped model.  In addition, some rather cool games were demoed, and to sum things up nicely, my jaw is on the floor overall.

In my original editorial on the Welcome Back program, I stated that you've got to vote with your dollars when dealing with companies in America.  In that case, I was extremely dissatisfied, and prepared to take my dollars elsewhere.  On the flip side, you've also got to support what you want to keep around as well.  It's in that spirit that I admit that I've got to back track on my original stance.  Despite Sony's complete incompetence at handling the PSN situation, they've turned around and done something very, very right here.  If anything can unseat Nintendo as the king of dedicated portable gaming, this is the piece of hardware that will do it.  Priced at the same point, and with a wider array of features that will work for every gamer, the PSV has the potential to breathe life back into the dedicated portable gaming market that iOS devices had put on life support.

It's hard to admit that you may have been a bit rash in your decision making, but I'll gladly eat my words in this case.  This is a step in the right direction for portable gaming, and in my opinion will be the definitive platform for dedicated portable gaming for years to come.