While Sony had said all along that they were looking for a way to help PlayStation Portable owners upgrade their current titles on UMD format to the digital format that will be required for the PSPGo, it looks like now that it just will not happen.

While the company claims that the digital download-only PSPGo is a new platform that will usher in Sony’s digital download future, many current PSP owners are already outraged that they will not be able to upgrade the UMD titles that they invested in purchasing should they want to move to the new PSPGo unit.

Sony claims that they have looked at a variety of different ways to handle such an upgrade program, but none of them really worked very well due to a variety of both technical and legal issues. The company claims that they will continue to support the current PSP UMD format while at the same time offering the digital download version for the PSPGo owners.

According to the latest from our sources, because they have not been able to offer an upgrade program should a current owner decide to move to the PSPGo, Sony is going to offer a choice of three free titles from a list of about seventeen offerings to those that upgrade. While we can’t confirm that this will be the case in anyplace but Europe at the moment, our sources tell us that Sony is planning to offer a similar program in other regions, as well.

The people who seem the most happy about Sony’s decision not to offer any sort of an upgrade path seem to be the retailers who sell both used PSP consoles and PSP games. A couple of dealers that we spoke with said that they do still expect that many fans of the PlayStation Portable will upgrade to the PSPGo despite the fact that they can’t take their UMD software libraries with them.

Many of these upgraders will have pretty much played out their titles and will trade both the titles and hardware in toward the purchase of a new PSPGo. Many expressed that they have always had a rather limited inventory of PSP UMD titles from which to choose, and this looks to no longer be the case in the future; but you can expect the price that will be paid for used PSP UMD titles to continue to trend downward quickly if the PSPGo proves to be successful.