Supposedly Sony is putting all their PSP UMD games on the PSN store for download to prepare for their new handheld, the PSP Go.
It seems possible, especially given the strange PSP Go hardware (it's an iPhone without the phone, and also it doesn't play PSP games! Brilliant!). On the other hand, these software-reliant upgrades (ie, Xbox to Xbox 360, previous Nintendo systems to GameCube/Wii) often focus only on first party/AAA titles, which wouldn't include EA Replay.
The UK store got a digital download version of EA Replay in January 2009.
Sony still quarantines their international divisions in a way that many companies don't anymore -- lots of independant licensing going on that makes it hard to predict (EA Europe, too, is still largely a separate entity, making it a doubly confusing situation).
Another hit is that unlike services like Steam and XBL, Sony charges developers directly for content hosting -- which has the practical effect of making them consider what they're posting a lot more carefully.
I don't think the title sold very well in the USA (last time I saw it for sale, it was priced at $3.99), and the game certainly has plenty of flaws, but it would be nice to be able to carry the SNES Wing Commander port around without a disc.
It was always a budget release (in the US, anyway). MSRP was $19.99 at launch... and then EA produced a giant whale-hole's worth of them for sale as $5 doorbusters that Thanksgiving (which is largely why it's so cheap now). More telling, though, is that development work was done on EA Replay 2 - which never saw the light of day (I think everybody is having trouble making money on the PSP, though...).
All they've made explicitly clear is that the vast majority of games released after October 1st of this year will be released on both PSN and UMD. Sony representatives have said that there will be a "goodwill program" for people upgrading to the PSP Go, but nobody really knows what that entails.
The wording alone should be enough to tell people that not even *Sony* knows what this means yet. Sony, lately, has been pretty bad about figuring out what people want in the first place... and this is a situation where even if they *do* understand that people want to transfer their UMDs to the PSP Go they're still limited by game publishers who will block their software being rereleased without their authorization.
