Also posted on my Tumblr:

A lot of people were up in arms over the PSP Go and having to purchase games they owned on UMD. This I could understand. UMDs have no (known) unique indentifier such as a serial code that an owner could use to prove ownership. It's one of those unfortunate consequences of progress. Sometimes it happens...although Sony could have just kept their mouths shut and let it blow over, rather than promising over and over that they would provide a way for UMD owners to redeem their games via PSN. That didn't work out too well, obviously.

Now Sony has compounded things with the upcoming Xperia Play, aka the Playstation Phone. In a recent announcement, Sony Ericsson stated that games already owned on PSN (eg, for play on a PSP or PSP Go) will have to be re-purchased to play on the phone, or presumably any future Playstation Certified device.</p>

Excuse me, Sony?

This is beyond the pale. Inexcusable. Sony should be capitalizing on this Playstation Certified concept to allow play on multiple devices, or even allow synchronized play as in the Steam Cloud: A player saves their game, and it's copied into the cloud, so when they fire up another device, their save is right there waiting for them to continue. It would be perfect for mobile devices and even multiplayer games such as the turn-based variety.

But no. As usual, a company with the power of distrubution has looked at the rampaging success of Steam and decided that they cannot possibly recreate something that robust and popular, and found ways to deliberately gimp their product. So now players who already own games now have to buy them a second time to play them on a second device that is, for gaming purposes, identical. First time around I was convinced Sony genuinely wanted to crush their own portable platform into dust. Now, in its third iteration, they are trying to do it again. I don't even know what is going through their minds at this point.