At Sony's Gamescom press conference it was unveiled that the PlayStation Portable would be starting a new lineup of downloadable titles under the name of minis - games that are less than 100MB and likely priced at $9.99 and lower.

Not to say that Sony hadn't already been tinkering with this idea - We have seen Everyday Shooter, Super Stardust Portable, Numblast and several other games come as exclusively digital PSP titles but there was never a place to really showcase them. Now they, along with over 50 new titles by the end of 2009, will have their own section, and will be given the treatment that deserve. 50 games by the end of the year? In contrast there are currently, in North America, only 98 PS3 PSN games made available since 2006.

But it appears that the PSP Store is going to be a very different beast to its PlayStation 3 counterpart. Included in those 50 games are titles coming from Halfbrick, who will be porting all of their XBL Indie Games with Halfbrick Blast Off, Echoes, Rocket Racing and Zombies (first footage of that in the trailer too). Gameloft are getting in on the action by porting numerous iPhone titles like Hero of Sparta, and in fact many iPhone games like Minigore and Fieldrunners are making their way to the platform as well. EA are also in on the action by finally bringing Tetris to the platform.

Going by this, it appears that PSP minis might be not going by the regular rating system. Mobile games, and iPhone games, do not go through the ESRB, USK or OFLC, and instead go by their own rating system - somehow regulations allow mobile development to do this. Considering the amount of games that they intend to release as well as the company its keeping, Sony may have been able to classify the PSP mini titles as mobile games.

Heck, even Funky Punch XL is on the list - a simple, not so good fighting game that's available on the iPhone and XBL Indie Games. It will be interesting to see how this ends up working in Germany and Australia, which has much stronger rules for games being released.

It has also been revealed that Pac-Man Championship Edition will be coming to the platform. While this sounds very much like a port of the iPhone version coming out in a month or two it also shows that, while the game is an Xbox 360 exclusive for consoles, this does not hold for hand-held platforms. If this is the case we could be seeing a lot of older XBLA games make their way over onto the PSP, but not the PSN.

Either way, this is going to be a very different direction for downloadable development. If this is considered a "mobile device" but with button controls we could see some of the XBLA's best games come out at a far lower price. It could also mean we'll see more classic games make their move strictly to the platform - like how Sega has done with Golden Axe, Streets of Rage and Sonic on iPhone - forget the PS3 and move straight onto the hand-held system with actual buttons on it.

A lot of this is speculation of course, but it certainly looks like it's going this way.