I watched movies go from VHS, to DVDs , and Sony was at the forefront of all the media changes. So I was sold on the umd format.

I remember being so jealous at my one friend who owned like The Matrix on umd.

UMD movies made perfect sense. It's not like the machine took mini-DVDs, and back then, watching anything on a mobile screen felt futuristic. Competing options included movies on Game Boy Advance cartridges and black-and-white Spongbob episodes on VideoNow CDs.

Warner did try the sensible thing - whole movies on mini-DVDs, which could play on mobile or home players. But they were so fundamentally dysfunctional that every movie came split across two discs. Not two-sided! Separate easily-scratched discs! Like you're gonna juggle that, in your pockets, halfway through Catwoman.

Where Sony fucked PSP users was on Memory Sticks. They took their price-gouging proprietary format, and made a special version you had to buy new. Oh were you already in the Sony ecosystem, for cameras and phones? Fuck you, buy it again. Then they released a newer PSP model and it took an even special-er version, so if you upgraded, you got zero benefit. I mean at least your games would play, until they released another PSP with no optical drive, and you bet your ass that took yet another extra-proprietary flash media format.

The wildest thing is - they weren't fighting bootlegs. There were no bootleg Memory Sticks. The DRM was not cracked until like 2020. Sony played these fuck-fuck games purely because they could. And it must have chased off a lot of early adopters who glanced at the DS line's simple backwards compatibility and thought Spirit Tracks looked fun.