During an interview with GameBusiness.jp, Sony’s product planning division head, Naoya Matsui, commented that Sony always had plans to go UMD-less, and that the PSP Go is the fruition of all that planning. “We’d planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning,” Matsui said. He goes on to state, “But if we’d simply released the hardware, there wouldn’t have been much for everyone to enjoy. We needed to prepare the right environment for it first – things like the transferal [sic] of content with the PS3 and PSN, and PC software to manage content like music and movies such as Media Go.”

Matsui explains that part of the progression of the PSP to the PSP Go is that Sony had to wait until digital content was on par with physical media, and that the timing now is right.  Also, they were waiting until it was capable and cost effective to hold several games on  small hard drive or memory stick. That’s one of the reasons Sony is still selling the existing PSP alongside the Go and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

[Via Edge]

[Via Joystiq]