Gamers Have to Pay to Move PSP Games to New Vita Platform

Video game publisher and hardware developer Sony has announced that those who are interested in moving their UMD and made for PlayStation Portable video games to the new Vita platform will have to pay, using a new service called the UMD Passport.

The new initiative will be launched on December 6, which means that players in Japan will have about 10 days to decided whether they plan to make the move, while those in North America and Europe will be able to ponder what to transfer for more than two months.

Sony says that about 200 video games from more than 40 companies will be supported in the UMD Passport service and that prices for the transfer in Japan will go from 500 to 3,400 Yen (which is from just over 6 to just over 30 dollars).

Those who want to make the transfer will have to download the UMD Registration Application on the PSP from the PlayStation Store, boot it up from the XMB menu and then insert a UMD which contains the video game that they want to register and then transfer.

Follow a number of on-screen prompts to register the disc and then log into the Vita and download the game at a discount price.

The high profile games that are supported include Phantom Kingdom, Persona 3 and Gran Turismo.

Fans of the PlayStation Portable, who have probably bought tens or hundreds of games for the platform, will not be happy about paying for a second time in order to play something that they already own.

It's highly likely that at some point Sony will change the nature of the UMD Passport program to allow a small number of games for each user to be transferred free of charge.

Vita will offer gamers more computing power than the current version of the PSP and developers say that experiences close to those seen on the PS3 are possible.