There’s been much speculating that Sony would ditch the UMD format and opt for only memory stick downloads with its rumored PSP redesign. Speaking to Pocket Gamer, senior product manager John Koller says this is not true. Sony will never “walk away from UMD.”

The reasons are various – UMD is equipped with 1.8 GB of storage space, the discs are not costly to produce, and they can be produced faster than cartridges. With all these advantages comes a disadvantage though, the UMD format is often criticized for its slow seeking speed, resulting in slower loading speed on games.

The good news is that developers are working hard to overcome this limitation. For instance, look at Koji Igarashi’s upcoming title for PSP, Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles. Igarashi explains how they overcame the slow seeking times of the UMD format:

To tell the truth, I was a little worried at first because I was told that the loading time was long when I started working on PSP. But thanks to programmers, we were able to achieve considerably fast loading times. We can overcome [loading times] by technique – it is the programmers’ chance to show what he can do.

That’s good news. In essence, developers just need to learn how to use the UMD format. All of the games we’ve seen so far with horrendous loading times (think WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW) didn’t have to be that way if they took the path Igarashi took. Let’s hope more developers are starting to get a handle on using the UMD format and throughout this year to 2008 we will forget about these slow loading times.

We’ll never walk away from UMD, says Sony’s John Koller [Pocket Gamer]

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