Sony: PSP to skew towards kids

The focus of the PSP is to begin shifting towards a younger audience, Sony America's marketing mouthpiece Peter Dille has said. By doing so, the handheld will equip Sony with "a very big tent" of PlayStation entertainment that doesn't rely on one product "like our competitors".

"There will be [a focus on the younger audience], and that's part and parcel with the strategy as you go longer into the lifecycle," Dille told thealistdaily. "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," he added, "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."

Whether the supposed-to-be-secret PSP2 will seek a younger audience remains to be seen. So far we've heard that Sony's new handheld will perform "like iPhone on steroids" and feature touch-screen controls on the reverse of the device.