Casual Flash Games on PSP

Along with all the other cool news dished out regarding the PSP and PS3 today in Japan came the announcement that the next PSP firmware will include Macromedia Flash 6.0 support. No, I’m not talking about the (very impressive) homebrew Flash solution released last week. This is official support in the firmware.

One of the problems mentioned at the press conference was that the PSP user base is mostly male. Obviously the selection of titles available for the device has a lot to do with this, and the marketing campaign with the two “hells yeah” squirrels doesn’t help either. (The Japanese ads don’t do much to cater to women either) But this Flash feature, if implemented and marketed correctly, could go a long way to evening this ratio out.

The good news is that Flash is king of free online casual games. How many times have you received some email from a friend pointing you to some stupid Flash game that you can’t stop playing? Never, you say? Well then you need new friends. Go here to see one of the more infamous time sucking Flash games.

Now the bad news is that the Flash games out on the web now generally use the mouse for interaction. Yes, there’s some with keyboard control, but most of them go with a click interface. I know the browser does the analog stick crosshair thing, but that’s just not going to cut it in most of these games.

This doesn’t mean that there’s a huge opportunity here for both new games and adapting older games for the PSP by adding keypress control and reformatting for the PSP screen. I can imagine sites dedicated to serving up these adapted games – with banner ads to make some cash. To me, this completely changes the appeal of a PSP. Suddenly you have a wealth of free, casual games waiting to be played right out of the box. Buy the hardware, connect to the net, play the games. Never buy a UMD. It’s really like XBox Live Arcade without the monthly subscription fee.

After saying all that, I have to throw in some ways Sony could mess this chance up or help it along.

First, the PSP doesn’t have much memory. You can see this when you browse the web with it. Load up cnet.com and you’re pretty much out of space. If the integrated Flash player is not written well, development for it could be a pain, and games that are out there now might not work. If all this thing can do is play some flash banner ads, it’s worthless, nothing to see here. Let’s assume that’s not the case.

Playing Flash games would become 100 times more convenient if they could be read from the memory stick. This way, a PSP Flash game service could offer download links for games which save them to your stick, and you could pull them up when you’re not connected to the net. Huge gain there. A little less convenient but still workable is if the PSP would cache the Flash with the page, and you could access the page in your history while offline, until it’s erased.

A relatively small but significant misstep by Sony would also be not providing ways to capture D-Pad and some other button presses in Flash. If the only interaction is using the virtual crosshair to point and click, you can pretty much throw many gaming opportunities out the window. I can easily see this happening if the browser keeps the same key bindings when a flash frame is active in the browser. I just hope Sony takes the time to go this extra mile.

Finally, they need to tout this Flash feature, and maybe offer a casual Flash game site themselves. I know the previous additions like the web browser and RSS audio feed player weren’t mass market gold – so I can forgive Sony barely mentioning either of them in their ads. But Flash games can be. They need to play it up. They don’t make their money on the hardware, but pimping Flash could be the move that takes their install base to the next level – especially with women. Large install bases get them larger UMD movie sales and more people giving the UMD games a try.

So my fingers are crossed. Do this right Sony – you’ve got an amazing device with little compelling content. Let’s fix it.

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