Sony Announces The ‘UMD Passport’

Dan Lee 54 Comments

Sony has announced, in Japan at least, the UMD Passport.

The aim of this is to let owners of PSP UMDs play their games on the Vita by giving them access to download versions at a discounted price.

To activate the UMD Passport you need to:

  • 1. Download a UMD Registration Application from PlayStation Store to your PSP
  • 2. Boot up the UMD Registration Application from your PSP’s XMB menu and insert the UMD game you want to register into the system.
  • 3. Follow the prompts to register your UMD disc with your PSN account
  • 4. You can then download the downloadable version of your game at a discounted price.

Apparently around 200 titles will be supported, with the likes of Square Enix, Capcom, Konami and Sega contributing.  The list is here.

Source: Andriasang

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54 Comments

  1. however you can play DVD’s in your bluray player at no extra cost

    • PS3 says it can play DVDs.

      Where does it say on the back of the PSP game box “You are entitled to play this game forever on all future Sony products.”

      The sense of entitlement here is unreal. The way I see it is:

      1. Sony don’t have to do this.
      2. It’s going to cost Sony to do this so, naturally, they’re going to pass on the cost to consumer.
      3. They’re not making you do this.
      4. Don’t want to pay for games again so you can play them on a NEW console? You know what you can do? Continue to play them on your old console.

      “But I want to be able to just carry ONE handheld around with me and it should play whatever I want/have paid for.”

      Welcome to the real world where companies have to make difficult choices to make their products successful.

      • Hear hear!

      • I’m willing to bet Sony had no difficulty in making this choice, by now I’m sure it’s second nature to them. In fact I’ll go even farther and say someone even got a pat on the back, and a “way to go” tossed their way.

      • Fair points well made Medulla, though I have a different opinion.I feel that in the grand scheme of things, this is gonna cost Sony next to nothing and my opinion is that it would be a greater contribution to the success of the console to offer a service like this without cost as it would undoubtedly (in my opinion) boost hardware sales, which in turn boosts Vita software sales.

        I would really like to see Sony gun for a big cut of the market with Vita, to avoid the dearth of software that plagued the PSP, the prohibitive launch price and schemes like this dissuade myself (and other friends I’ve just been chatting with) from early adoption.

        Sure the PSP had some ace titles, but there just weren’t enough of them to my mind and now that Vita is facing competition from mobile phone/tablet gaming (in my opinion), I think they really need to hammer the adoption angle and get it into as many hands as possible, as fast as possible.

        I’m not sure this difficult choice will contribute to the success of the product personally.

      • “The sense of entitlement”
        an ironic choice of words when talking about an industry that thinks it deserves to profit from preowned sales.
        that we don’t own the games we buy.
        and we aren’t allowed to sell them without cutting them in.

        no, sony didn’t have to make the vita play psp games, but they did, and you know why?
        because it’s a selling point.
        because they’ll have a huge library to sell to vita owners from day one.

        they didn’t do it to be nice.

        it’s like the ps2 games on ps3.
        you can play em if you buy them again, but not if you have the disc.

      • Wow, Hazelam, you sound like a very angry, unhappy person.

        I’ve just read some of your other comments.

        Ever think of trying a different hobby? Gaming obviously makes you extremely upset.

      • This is still better than the deal with the pspGo.

        I can see that they can’t make it free, because then second hand UMDs would get passed around. Obviously it would have been better (for me) with an optional “Mail in your UMD and we’ll refund the discounted price” deal.

        I never buy a game with the assumption that I can play it on another system (unless it has already been announced that I can) so I have no reason to complain.

  2. How much I like this will depend on what percentage the discount is.

    • The discount prices aren’t too wonderful. They’re generally either 500 yen or 1000 yen so far, which translates to £8 for Gran Turismo or Persona 3.

      Personally, I’d be expecting PSP game prices to drop quite a lot when the PSV launches anyway.

  3. It’s basically buying the same thing again. You will be best off keeping your PSP and your collection as it is free.

  4. If they’re going to include the PSV under the PSP accounts 2 accounts rule the licensing agreement from the PSP games should get transfered to the PSV. It would be better for Sony to sell some kind of UMD add-on then make people rebuy their games. The PSP is dead, what the harm of letting people play the games they bought on the PSV. They can always just stop making UMDs and eventually the problem will fix itself. Lots of people bought into Sony because of backwards compatibility, removing it is only going to send customers somewhere else.

  5. So I guess people in here are gonna buy Vita for playing UMD games. I’l buy the Vita for Vita games.

  6. Right! you lot shush your moaning about cost, piss-take blah blah blah etc. They could choose to not do it the same as you can choose not to re-buy your games (or a Vita for that matter). If Sony announced this for PS2 software you’d all be blacking out with excitement.

    • Agree, sadly a vocal minority are making the word “gamer” synonymous with “whiner”.

      Doesn’t matter what a company does, there’ll be someone venting their anger at the apparent injustice of it all.

      I’d like to see the people complaining name a single games system that underwent a change in storage format and still maintained backwards compatibility without people having to re-buy their games in one form or another.

      • Launch day PS3, but the crippling losses Sony were making led to them removing the feature to make PS3 cheaper.

      • @colmshan technically true but not really the same situation as Blu-Ray is inherently backwards compatible with DVD.

        What I should have said was “significant change in storage format”.

  7. I don’t have any PSP games, but the discounted prices on that site seems reasonably low. 1000 yen is just £8, and some of them where half that. If you don’t want to buy the game again, play it on the PSP and buy new games for the Vita.

  8. I hope it’s a heavily discounted price.

    • It’s done on a game by game basis, but most are between 500 and 1000 yen, or £4 to £8.

      From the list, a couple of the games that you can do this for are Gran Turismo and Patapon 3. These both drop to 1000 yen, but on the UK PSN store have a starting point of £17 and £21 respectively. So that’s around 50% and 60% off.

      If that’s not heavily discounted, then I don’t know what is…

  9. Got a PSP thanks bye

  10. If anyone has UMD games, wouldn’t it follow therefore that they still own a PSP to play them on. Why would anyone want to buy them again for the Vita when they could just pick up their old PSP and use that.
    Surely if people are doing this with the Vita it would make the PSP worthless as the only thing worth trading would be it’s UMD games. I think that most PSP/UMD game owners will stick with the old PSP for UMD’s and Vita games for the Vita!

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