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UMD Sales Picking Up Steam
After what some deemed a slow start, Sony is now claiming that they've sold slightly more than 17 Million UMDs since the launch of the PSP. 9 Million of these discs have been games, with just over 8 Million UMD movies. From the article: "Current manufacturing lines are stretched to the max - Bob Hurley, with Sony DADC, says that Sony is churning out 200,000 UMDs a day and future capacity is expected to be 500,000 per day. 'Tiger Woods Golf is my personal favorite [game], but video has been surprisingly good to us,' says Hurley. In a few years Sony expect videos to be more than 60 percent of all UMD sales, with an expected 130 million UMDs being sold in 2008."
You'd really think Valve would have an annoucement about this on their site somewhere...
I'd be curious to see the sales numbers broken out by territory, especially the movies. Are UMD movies selling well in America, or has Japan been helping those numbers?
Considering no one I know has been the least bit interested in movies, despite enjoying the PSP, I'm honestly surprised with those figures...
to human stupidity.
movies I can't play anywhere other than on my tiny PSP screen, for more than a DVD? SIGN ME UP!
Seriously, I doubt UMDs will account for 60%, as the novelty of this format will soon wear off. (one can hope, anyway...)
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UMDs seem to majorly outnumber games. You can't buy what isn't there.
I like muppets.
The PSP had it's EU launch today. I work in central London and took a walk around at lunch-time today, popping into a good few shops selling it to see what take-up was like (not to buy one myself - I got a US import back in May).
Simply put, it looks phenomenal. I know the initial sales in the US weren't quite what were expected, but at 1PM today, I couldn't find a single shop in the Victoria-area that still had stock to sell. I went into Dixons, HMV, Game and Virgin and all of them had sold out. I heard the guy in Game saying that they'd sold out of the non-preordered machines within about 10 minutes of the midnight opening. There were queues to the door in a few shops with people trying to find out where to get hold of them and staff phoning sister-stores to find out if anybody else had them in stock, with no apparent success.
Europe has traditionally been a very Sony friendly territory, even when they do shaft us over release dates. I'll be interested to see our DS vs PSP sales figures come Christmas.
Gotta give to the American gaming public, they love slick marketing so much they went out and bought something they probably already had in their collections and then bought some $30 UMD movies to go on top of it. I'll just continue to watch my $17 DVDs on my wireless laptop and listen to my iPod and save myself the $250 until Sony stops porting year-old PS2 games to the PSP. I recently saw an article lambasting the gaming industry for lack of innovation... but I'm starting to think the blame for all this vanilla is being put in the wrong place.
...these Umbrellas of Mass Destruction. They serve no additional purpose in a civilized society living under the constant shadow of nuclear annihilation.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
wildly optimistic. or they're going to bring out some porno umd's.
Already got those, arigatou gozaimasu.
"9 Million of these discs have been games, with just over 8 Million UMD movies"
How many of those were the bundled Spiderman 2?
Now do those figures mean consumers ahve purchased 9 million or that retailers have purchased 9 million and they are just sitting on their shelves? Sales figures like that have always confused me as it is hard to see how they could quickly & easily track actual consumer sales.
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Just curious :) Also are these shipped numbers or sold? I thought Sony only reported shipped numbers.
Are these actual retail sales or simply product that Sony has sold to retailers. The number seems awfully high and it makes me wonder what percentage of the UMDs are sitting on store shelves right now versus how many have actually sold.
The whole things smells of how to lie with statistics.
zosxavius photography
I own a PSP, and have since around their NA launch, I've never even considered buying a UMD movie. Why pay the same price as a DVD (that plays on my PC, Laptop & Television, and can be encoded to fit on my memory stick for the PSP) for a lower quality disc I can only use on one device?.
Now, if they sold DVD & UMD combo packs for like $3-$5CDN above the DVD only price, they might hook me in. But even then, the prices on portable DVD players are comming down so fast why bother? I've already got 100+ DVDs, buying one of those (while adding bulk to my tech bag) would make more sense.
paul reinheimer
Hell, if I had been fool enough to dish out $300 on a PSP I'd be happy about such stupid little things like a barely usable web browser and the ability to pay twice for movies and then get a limited format that is sub-par to almost everything out there... Yay!
With the horrible shortage of anything decent to play on the PSP except decade old roms, UMD's are about the only way to feel like you got any value from your purchase and even then it is pretty damn questionable.
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SONY comes out and markets the PSP as to compete with the DS. The DS basically won with Nintendogs and Advance Wars. With Mario Kart on the horizon hope is lost.
But wait, what's this? By selling UMDs they switched markets! PSP vs. video iPod, stay tuned.
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The only exception I see is that a video iPod would (most likely) have an integrated AV port, such as that which was in certain iBook models.
Hell, they already sell a cable for it. It would allow you to connect to any external video/audio source to play the content. Not to mention that, if you purchased video clips or movies through the iTunes store, you would most likely be able to play the content on the computer as well (iTunes already has video playing capabilities).
I think that if Apple does a video iPod, and does it right, they would blow the PSP out of the water. Jobs has said they'll never make one, which I find highly unlikely since it seems that the market will eventually demand it. I just hope that, once they make one, they won't screw it up.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
I'm fairly certain there are currently more compelling UMD movies available for the PSP than there are games. Now we hear that the sales are nearly split. I find it humorous that the PSP is not being used in it's primary function. Does that make it a failure?
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Doer of bad deeds, screenwriter-wannabe
savagexp
OK, apparently the iPod photos already have this capability, and their own cable. I was not even aware of that.
Obviously then, the iPod video would have a clear advantage straight out of the gate.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
Who are we? I'm 22, most of us are adults. We often have laptops, or portable DVD players to watch movies on. We buy our own things.
Who is buying the PSP movies? I think the answer is obvious: not us. So who is doing it? Moms! There are lots of kids out there with PSPs (despite Sony targeting it as the Adult handheld). Buying UMD movies makes some sense. You can get something that you kid will watch in the car on the way to/from school, sitting at the doctor's office, etc. It runs on something they already have so you don't have to buy (and they don't have to carry around) a portable DVD player. Most cars don't have DVD players. And most kids don't have laptops to play DVDs on. For a kid, it does make some sense.
I think this is where all the movie sales are going. I don't think I've ever seen an adult interested in them, but I've seen many kids at stores looking at those movies. I can see why they'd want it (I would have when I was 10 if I liked more movies they sold).
I'd like to see the sales broken down by age range of the person the movie was bought for. THAT would be the interesting information (although sales by territory as another commenter suggested would be interesting too).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
When almost 50% of software sales for a GAME system are MOVIES, isn't something wrong?
People always talk about the Nintendo DS as a gimmick handheld. But I'm starting to think the PSP is actually the gimmick here. Be honest, would you even think about buying a $250 PSP if all it did was play movies that cost just as much or sometimes more than DVDs on a screen the fraction of the size of a TV? Basically, the idea that it's actually a "gaming" device is a gimmick, at least with it's current library of games.
I still feel money is better spent on devices directed precisely for a single purpose. If you want movies, get a portable DVD player. If you want music, get an Ipod Mini. If you want gaming, get a Nintendo DS. All these things are each cheaper than a PSP, and while the PSP combines all these things, it sacrifices a high level of quality in each area. A portable DVD player has a much larger and better screen, as well as a larger movie library, an Ipod Mini has astronomically more space for music, and the DS has, albeit arguably, much better games at the present.
Combine these figures with the Ken Kutaragi's comment that the PS3 "is not a game machine," and the idea that Sony is using gaming as a trojan horse for it's other businesses seems more and more feasible.
Having bought both a DS and a PSP on their respective launch dates (making me a "fanboy" of both), as well as being a mass-transit commuter, I will say that the PSP gets considerably more time than the DS.
Quite frankly, the DS launch library sucked. There was Mario 64 and that was about it. Maybe Feel The Magic. Now, with Meteos out as well as Advance Wars, the library has picked up. But until very recently, it started to feel like a dumb purchase.
However, the PSP launched with a pretty good library. Ports or new versions of good PS2 games like Ridge Racer, Twisted Metal Black, and Wipeout were pretty impressive. Most notable was Lumines, which just simply blew me away. After the first hour with it, I was confident that the DS was screwed - the PSP was just that impressive with the screen, the CD quality soundtracks, etc. After the honeymoon was over, I still play the heck out of it.
The PSP did have quite a few problems, to me most notably the quality of the screen. I went through FOUR PSPs before I found one that was acceptable - all four had multiple dead pixels and/or unusually uneven backlighting which just drove me nuts. The movie playing feature was pretty useless unless you shelled out for an overly expensive Memory Stick Duo.
That said, once you find a non-defective unit and you drop enough cash into it, the PSP does really outshine the DS. With a 1GB stick in it, I can have a two full-length movies on it, MP3s, and even photos of my kids. Most importantly, since I have a 1.50 version, I have emulators & the naughty iso launcher. And I still have Lumines ready to go. Even the battery life isn't an issue like I feared it would be - I charge it on the same schedule as my cell phone, and I've never come close to running out of juice.
Now, I'll be pretty pissed if my firmware gets updated, but I'll still have the other features. I'm sure when a must-have DS game comes out, I'll spend time with that, but the PSP just has so much more to offer. Really, the DS and PSP don't even really seem like competitors - they are almost focused in entirely different directions.
...unless Sony releases UMD burner/rom-drives that supports any data for computers. It's clear that Sony is making the same misstake again. Why not let other manufactures make/sell UMD-ROM drives and UMD-Burners by letting them pay a royalty to Sony?, I'd buy a drive or two =P