The Japanese website GameBusiness claims, in an interview with Naoya Matsui, Sony planned the demise of the UMD a long time ago.In the interview, he claimed that Sony always planned to release a handheld gamer, like the PSP Go, without a UMD drive.
"We'd planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning," he's reported as saying.
No physical media
According to Matsui, Sony has been waiting for the electronic delivery mechanisms to mature sufficiently to make physical media redundant.
He explained: "We wanted to release it when the delivery of digital content was on par with the delivery of physical media. That's what we've been working on these past two years."
Whether Sony really did have the UMD's demise planned when the original PSP launched in 2004, we'll never really know, but come October's PSP Go launch, we'll definitely get a feel for life without those unloved little disks.