When will the PSP Get Trophies?

Kris Erickson • Dec 1, 2008 • Comments (2)

Like the fat kid on sports day, PSP owners are feeling a little bit left out when it comes to winning trophies on their favorite handheld. Trophies have proven to be a big success on the PS3, ever since they were introduced via firmware update earlier in the summer. It seems that gamers can’t get enough of those virtual rewards, and have even resorted to replaying old games in order to accumulate them. The news that Echochrome PS3 will get trophy support has irked us, because that game began life as a puzzler exclusive to the PSP. If the PS3 version of the game can get retroactive trophy support, why can’t the PSP? Sony has been on a mission lately to heighten convergence between the two platforms (PSN, franchise tie-ins). So, how long will it take before trophies are also a fixture of PSP games?

Our first clue came from a French development studio which let slip in September that Sony had plans to add trophies to the PSP in an upcoming firmware revision. However, firmware 5.0 hit this fall without a trophy in sight.

In another interview, Buzz! Master Quiz producer Emerson Escobar said: “We’ve also implemented a trophy system. Let’s say you answer a question within one second, you get a lightning finger trophy. If you answer a question within half a second, you get a supersonic trophy.” In fact, the recently released game DOES offer trophies for completing certain objectives, but so far these are not tied to the gamer’s PSN ID. Nevertheless, these trophies actually improve gameplay by giving players a reason to aim for 100% completion. Game designers are understandably eager to implement this system in their own upcoming games.

So, how long will we have to wait until our PSP trophy collections are compatible with our console PSN ID? Even though Sony has not offered any official word on cross-platform trophy support, most observers expect that it is arriving soon. Company spokespeople have already hinted that many new improvements will be coming to the handheld later in 2009, and we expect that trophy support will be one of the major features that is unveiled. If we had to make an educated guess, we would say that the next major firmware revision (6.0) will include cross-platform trophy support. We would tentatively place the release of this new firmware sometime between January and April 2009.