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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."
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.