Sony America has confirmed what must be every potential PSPgo upgrader’s worst nightmare – there will be no program allowing users to convert their UMD collections to play on the new machine. Dammit!

It so nearly happened too, as a SCEA rep sheepishly explains to Kotaku.com:

“We were evaluating a UMD conversion program, but due to legal and technical reasons we will not be offering the program at this time.”

And that’s that. However, if you’re the owner of a sizeable UMD library and you’re thinking of upgrading to PSPgo when it launches next week, all is not yet lost – the little discs are perfectly proportioned for propping up an unstable table leg. And they make great coasters for really little glasses.

Silliness aside, this is absolutely rubbish isn’t it. It’s just about bearable that new generations of home console hardware are not always fully backwards compatible, but the PSPgo is just the same machine underneath that slick exterior. In other words it’s fully capable of playing your old UMDs, Sony just hasn’t designed it to do so.

Ah well. At least we have those three free games to download while we ponder what to do with our redundant UMD collection (see previous story). And that’s three more games than our American chums are getting too. This still feels like a mighty slap in the face, though…