According to developer talk recounted by Edge at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Sony’s next PSP iteration will include a UMD drive, despite the company’s renewed focus on digital distribution. It was originally assumed by many that the PSPgo was Sony’s first step towards moving to a digital only platform but recent murmurs out of Tokyo suggest that this is not the case.

Specifically, Edge says several prominent developers remain “convinced” that UMD will play a leading role going forward, with digital taking the backseat for the foreseeable future. This, coupled with the fact that Sony is not mandating that third-party studios release titles digitally leads us to believe that the day when physical based media is fully abandoned in the portable space isn’t coming anytime soon.

PSP-4000 To Support UMD? [Edge]

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