Clearly, the DS IS expanding the existing GBA market. It's selling insanely well in Japan and currently outselling the PSP in the USA (although the initial surge from the Lite seems to be slacking off). I can't even account for the massive sales in Japan.

While I want the PSP to succeed and yes, it's great that it has sold as well as it has, the games aren't selling like the PS1 titles did in its first respective year, and it's not the clearly dominant or preferred-for-development platform in the handheld market the way the PS1 dominated the console wars.

On the other hand, much of the media hype, doomsaying and bullshit you read about how the PSP is dying, failing, or how the PS3 will surely fail has more roots in fanboyism than fact. The reality is clearly somewhere in between.

While not ousting Nintendo from their last truly lucrative market, the PSP has definitely brought older gamers to handhelds. Its sales have been pretty strong, far better than any other non-Ninty handheld and better than many previous gen consoles (it'll likely pass worldwide Gamecube sales in the next couple of months or so).

I do wish Sony would share that sell-through data, though... While likely not the 20+ million shipped figure, it would finally lay to rest all the ridiculous anti-Sony bloggers and posters alleging sales totals as low as 12 million worldwide -- The real figure is probably anywhere between 15 and 18 million, but how would we know? Sony needs to do better at providing real data to back up these claims that they're expanding the marketplace. Otherwise, most media types are going to discount them the way they do the shipped vs. sales figures.

Reply

Damn it Andrew Yoon! There's a typo in the title. It's not "bullish" it's "bullshit". You can thank me later. By the way, I want gold stars! Pixelator has two and he's obviously a Sony fanboy so what gives? (No offense Pixelator) Also I was wondering, if the PSP were purely a game system, no mp3 or umd movies, just games, do you think it could compete as well as it has with the DS? This really isn't a loaded question, no sarcasm or anything, I'm just wondering what other people think.

Reply

@ wii the people (If that is your real name...)

The reason you aren't getting any stars is that you're making posts like that, completely having nothing to do with the actual article. To answer your question though, I do not think it would sell as well if it wasn't a multimedia device. I know one of my friend's picked it up because he was impressed by the games I had AND the features.

I do agree that the PSP is reaching a different demographic. They are reaching the mature audiences who have been playing the PS2 and PSone, but never owned a GBA because they feel that Nintendo is 'teh kiddy'.

I have no idea what the actual sales figures are at, and Sony is probably trying to cover them up for good reason. That 20 million shipped is an impressive number, unless you dissect and see they probably mean something more around 15 or 14 million sold.

The PSP has penetrated the market, that much is fact. It is not a dead console, nor is it dying. Support for it is still strong and titles seem to be getting better in quality now as it ages and as the developer's adjust to programming and developing for a portable platform. Never has another handheld done this well against Nintendo.

Reply

@ Siler R. Wolfe- Point taken.

Okay, I have to disagree with some of the previous comments. First off we need a definition for "mature". Are we talking about the armchair quaterbacks of yore who buy every new installation of Madden, NBA Live, or Burnout in order to relive their mountain dew guzzling, letterman jacket wearing glory days? Are we talking about fourteen year olds who get turned on by sticking it to the man and vicariously car-jacking? Lets face it, the PSP doesn't necessarily appeal to a "mature" audience. If anything the DS does that a little better.

The multimedia functions are cool but so what? My phone does everything a PSP can do and my browser is much faster (except for play UMDs and PSP games of course).

Think what you want, but for the love of media literacy do not believe the horse shit that this guy is pitching.

Reply

Thanks Fox, September DS numbers may indeed be back up for the DS with the pink and black models. Hell, I even want a black one and I already have a white JP model!

I say 15-18 because we don't have Korean figures, except for the 500K sold which was some time ago. PSP interest there has been quite strong. We also don't have current numbers for many European countries, or Mexico/South America, Isreal or any other Asian countries besides Japan. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure Nintendo takes all sales into consideration (although how they get direct reports from all retailers is a bit of an unknown, I think). Also, when using NPD, you have to realize they aren't accounting for some chains or any online sales, which naturally counts for Nintendo as well.

I think the far more important number right now isn't whether the PSP has sold 15 million or even 20 million worldwide, it's how games are selling. That is perhaps the #1 factor that will get more development on the system, and keep the ball rolling in favor of the platform.

To me, both systems are cool. I _personally_ enjoy the PSP games more, but the DS is optimal depending on your tastes or needs (I'm probably buying my girlfriend's daughter a pink one - heh). In the end, competition makes for better games, better hardware (Lite, rumored revised PSP), lower prices and more for the consumer. It's a win-win, provided Sony and the PSP devs can keep up their end of the bargain and maintain a competitive product.

Reply

I'm interested in knowing where PSP fanboy's review of this week's hardware sales are. Last week when Nintendo had a 50% sales drop on the dslite, and the PSP increase about 20% there were loads of PSP fanboys going on about how the DS is now failing and the PSP is gonna now sell more.

Yet this week the DSLite has increased sales, and the PSP has lower sales and there's no review by PSP fanboy. Strange that considering that both DSFanboy and NintendoWiiFanboy post the figures every week even if the DS loses some sales.

Sony really should give us sales figures instead of shipped figures. And all companies should keep track of how many faulty consoles/handhelds come back so that these are deducted from sales totals. I'd also like to see this sony guy's source for figures for that last statement he made about more 50-60 years olds playing playstation platforms. Maybe he's right but he excludes the DS from the figures.

Reply

To pixelator, fox, wolfe and others:

I agree with you but all your analysis about sales and shipped is plain radiculus.

Basically, all this sales versus shipped figures is a prime example of how incredibly stupid most of the bloggers and the whole "blogoshpere” are. You do not have too be too bright to understand that there is almost NO difference between shipped and sold. Lets me break it down for you.

Shops that sell PSPs (well at least here in Tokyo) renew their stock weekly or even more often then that. In one week (according to the "independent analysts") PSP sells say 20 000 unit. How many PSPs stores would order for the next week? The correct answer is: about the same amount, i.e. 20 000. And indeed, why store would order more if it can not sell it? Or do you think stores enjoy paying for all that warehouse space to keep millions of unsold PSPs?

So the difference between sold and shipped at every single moment in Japan is only 20 000 units or LESS. Multiply it by 3 (UK, US) and you get 60 000 unit. Let be very generous and say 100 000 unit. THIS 100K units or LESS is the real difference between sold and shipped.

So, please, please get it in your thick sculls people: IF STORES CAN NOT SELL THEY DO NOT ORDER. IF STORES DO NOT ORDER SONY DOES NOT SHIP. IF SONY CAN NOT SHIP IT DOES MAKE.

Basically, EVERY company including Nintendo implies *shipped* when they say sold. The main reason is because knowing the number of units actually sold is completely useless: on a scale of Sony there is almost no difference between shipped and sold. Collecting such data is plain waste of money.

The modern manufacturing works on a very flexible “on-demand” production model where the production numbers are changed almost daily to ovoid over production. If Sony had 6 millions unsold units it would stop production completely until it sells them. 6 millions unsold units is a $600 000 or MORE of losses. That is a lot of money, stock holders will kill you for that.

Of course you can say that Sony is lying and not telling the correct number. That would be a different question, though as a publicly traded company by law Sony must disclose such information. Also, the number of manufactured units is a totally different story: certainly Sony has a certain number stocked just in case, but that is not included into shipped figures.

Anyway, the persistence of this “sales versus shipped” argument is really f***ing annoying with all this people coming with some idiotic analysis, based on some crap they read on some “indendent analysts” web sites. Which is utterlly readiculus.

All this shows 2 very sad facts: 1) most of the general opulation have absolutely no idea of how the real world works and how things are made. 2) The blogsphere represent the most moronic part of this population. But I bet you all can name all the leading actors in Battleship Glalactica, do not you? All power to you guys.

Reply

correction:

$600 000 should be read as $600'000'000. it assumes that cost of production is $100. If its $150 then Sony loss on PSP will become nearly 1 billion. There is no company that can sustain such losses just from one division.

Reply

@ wii the people (again...)

I never said I buyed what he was selling, I just said I agree with that part of his statement.

Reply

Killbloggers a key mistake you made is asuming that the PSP sells out every week. If there are only 20 000 or so unsold PSPs in Japan how can there be an increase in sales the next week? Wouldn't that require an excess that doesn't sell? That is clearly wrong because some weeks the PSP sells 40K and others only 30K. They Probably have 200K in stock and keep it at that level for most of the year.

Also you asumed that North Amercia and Europe sell the same amount a week as Japan. This may be true but NA and Europe stocks are probably bigger than Japan stocks due to population size. They probably have Extra each 400K each.

The last thing is the fact that it depends when the numbers are gathered. If you compare shipped to sales in October and November, the shipped would be larger because companies are preparing for the holiday sales. But in February and March the numbers would be back to how they should be because the surplus for the holidays will have sold.

Reply

Scooter:

There is no mistake in my arguments.

The excess of PSPs that is not sold is divided between a) stores warehouses and b) Sony warehouses (these are not reported as *shipped* since they are at Sony hands).

My main point is that the amount in store warehouses is relatively small. Stores do not keep large inventories as it’s a waste of space and money. Not good foe business. When a store sees that their inventory runs low they simply call Sony sales division and ask them for a re-fill. And I am sure Sony is very happy to oblige. All big companies like Sony rent warehouse across the country, which makes delivery everywhere very quick, within 1 maximum 2 days. In fact there is a huge world-wide system of logistic, shipping, warehouses and delivery companies that serve big corporations like Sony. They make sure everything runs smoothly.

You suggest that stores in Japan would have 200K of PSP in stock: that is 5 to 8 weeks of PSP sales! There is no SANE shop owner who would keep this amount of dead inventory when all he should do is to simply pick up a phone and call to Sony for a new delivery.

Yes, there are seasonal variations when stock increases due to predictable increase of demand. But my main point stands: every PSP shipped to store must be sold at some point. UNLESS PSP IS SOLD, SHOPS DO NOT ORDER MORE. AND IF SHOPS DO NOT ORDER SONY DOES NOT SHIP.

In any case even assuming your analysis (which is incorrect) the top number of PSP unsold would stand at 1 million max. All the talk about 8 to 6 millions of unsold PSPs are absolutely and totally preposterous.

Reply

- DS Lite: 134,885 21,045 (18.49%)
- PS2: 34,189 14,307 (71.96%)
- PSP: 26,995 2,146 (7.36%)
- GBA SP: 2,330 226 (10.74%)
- Game Boy Micro: 1,244 557 (30.93%)
- Xbox 360: 928 166 (15.17%)
- Gamecube: 630 66 (9.48%)
- DS Phat: 478 580 (54.82%)
- GBA: 27 14 (107.70%)
- Xbox: 7 2 (40.00%)

Reply

Killbloggers -

I also think there are mistakes in your arguament:

"You suggest that stores in Japan would have 200K of PSP in stock: that is 5 to 8 weeks of PSP sales! There is no SANE shop owner who would keep this amount of dead inventory when all he should do is to simply pick up a phone and call to Sony for a new delivery."

Here you are suggesting that a single shop owner has the 200K of surplus PSPs which I agree is ridiculus. However, think about game shops of which there are potentially thousands in Japan, plus other stores that may sell consoles like supermarkets. Most game shops will stock more than one of each console...lets take a figure and say each would have atleast 10 PSPs in stock. So in theory 20,000 shops in japan may have 400K PSPs between them on their shelves doing nothing. obviously 20K or so PSP gets sold every week in Japan so the individual companies that sell them reorder more to make up for those sold.....hence yes more are shipped.

On a larger scale across the world there are potentially millions of PSPs sitting on shelves, even if each store only stocks 10 or so of them. And again, when they sell some of their stock they may reorder more.

So can you see Killbloggers how sales figures are different to shipped. Sony are not selling PSPs to one company that can stop orders until their stock is gone. Millions of shops may have special offers on that cause their stock to get sold and hence order more.

Basically Killbloggers your theory seems to apply if no shops actually stock the PSPs in the first place - the customer has interest and the business rings sony for the amount of PSPs required and then sells to the customer, and so there is no surplus stock. Which of course is wrong.

Reply

The idea that there are as many as 8 MILLION PSP's out there floating in 'warehouses' collecting dust is simply insane. If the product wasn't moving in Japan or the USA, then those hardware shipment figures would drop to almost nothing. There is no 7 or 8 million unit discrepancy between Sony's 20 million shipped claim and their sell through sales. Even 4 million is doubtful. There simply aren't enough stores with such ample warehouse space to justify this theory, and stores like Wal-Mart and Target would STOP ORDERING if they weren't selling product out of their central warehouses. They do not stockpile to this degree.

@wii the people: You others 'fanboys' (like you're not a Nintendo fanboy?), proceed to ramble your anti-PSP jargon on a PSP site and then get confused why you don't have stars? Come on. You're just trying to stir the pot like the all the other PSP and Sony haters. It's immature and lacking any real purpose other than to gratify your antagonistic fanboyish agenda.

@Jules: PSP Fanboy doesn't post all Media Create (note: that doesn't equate to all Japan sales, like NPD doesn't equal all USA sales) figures every week because 1). It's not always totally relevant to other countries because, well, it's JAPAN - a significant but insular game market and 2). There's no need to post ALL news regardless of whether it's good or not. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but there's just no need to have a running ticker of M-Create on this site.

Reply