Sony always planned to release a UMD-free PSP

Sony bossman of product planning, Naoya Matsui, has stated that the company always planned to eventually release a UMD-free PSP once the digital distribution market matured.

"We'd planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning," Matsui told GameBusiness. "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 of content with the PS3 and PSN, and PC software to manage content like music and movies such as Media Go.

"We wanted to release it when the delivery of digital content was on par with the delivery of physical media. That’s what we've been working on these past two years. We'll be selling the PSP Go alongside the existing PSP models, because it's a product targeted at those people who are more accustomed to digital content."

PSP Go is slated for release in the US and Europe on October 1, and in Japan come November.

More over on Develop.