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PSP Smashes Sales Records in the UK
404Ender writes "According to recent numbers the PSP has sold more than 185,000 units since launching September 1. This blows the previous record away, which happened to be set by the Nintendo DS. This is wonderful news for fans of the Sony handheld, and it certainly quiets many of the naysayers who have been pointing to the success of the DS sales compared to the PSP. Does this solidify Sony's position in the handheld market with a firm foot in the door?"
Of course it does, it really is an impressive piece of kit for the price and is better for gamers since a bit of healthy competition in the handset market for nintendo will hopefully produce better games for both the DS and PSP.
Yes, is this just hype and deliberately pent-up demand? A lot will be down to sustaining sales by delivering great games.
No Nintendogs in the UK yet to switch attention to the DS.
......stop crippling it! The day Sony releases a firmware update allowing MP4 video playback from Sony memorystick i WILL buy one, until that day.............. maybe. I don't like buying deliberately crippled hardware, leaves a bad taste in ones mouth. It would be worth Sony's while, because i would even buy one of their hideously expensive 1GB Memorystick Pro's. Sort it out Sony.
Disclaimer: I own every modern console, and alot of older stuff too. I couldn't care less about sales figures, but thought this point was saillant enough to make.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
Hello little Anonymous Trollward...
The PSP is just another time wasting device made by a company that saw a crowed market and said me too.
Can you tell me how is the handheld console market crowded? before the PSP the only company "competing" in that market was Nintendo... since the days of the GameBoy... of course I know there where others but, Nintendo did had a real monopoly on this market.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Firstly, in case anyone hasn't read that fine article, this is UK sales, not Euro-wide, worldwide or whatever.
But my main point is that they're so impressed with their stuffing of the software charts. Frankly, there's such a massive games drought here in the UK at the moment that I'm almost surprised it wasn't even more 'impressive'; they've got nothing to compete with.
Just as an example, the UK's biggest selling DS title (which people are always desperate to compare the PSP to) is Mario 64. Yes, a launch game. We don't have Nintendogs yet, nor Advance Wars. The last big PC game was Battlefield 2 months ago, and there's been nothing on PS2 worthwhile since God Of War. This was the 'Full Price' chart, so the budget release of the new update to Ghost Recon 2 on the XBox doesn't count, either.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
when the PSP was release here stateside - there was very little reason to purchase one - the launch games were mediocre and the hardware price was twice its nearest competitor.
fast forward to today, the game selection is much better and the movie support has been surprising as well. but thats not the true reason if i did purchase one.
its the availablity of homebrews. that and the huge amounts of pirated software thats available for it. its the same reason why the xbox sold well with the "computer power users"
300 bucks is easy to swallow if you know games can be gotten free....
Europe does matter. A lot. The figures quoted here may not seem immense, but they are the figures for just one European country. The UK has a population of 58 million. Looking at the EU wall-chart stuck up on the wall next to my desk, France's population is 59 million, Germany's is 82 million, Italy is 57 million, Spain is 39 million, the Netherlands are 16 million. That's leaving off umpteen other countries, including some really big (and fairly wealthy) non-EU ones like Turkey. Now, some of these countries are bigger gaming markets than others; certainly the UK, Germany and the Netherlands seem to have more gamers per head of population than France and Spain. However, the overall picture is of an absolutely huge market, at least on a par with the US.
Of course, this gets downplayed a bit in the media. The fact that "Europe" as a whole has a more fragmented retailer base than the USA or Japan means that you don't often tend to see unified sales figures for the whole territory. However, Nintendo's biggest mistake of the last "desktop" console generation has been their utter neglect of the European market, with many games appearing many, many months after US releases, generally either because of obscure business reasons, or a supposed need to add in (usually amateurish) regional translations that most European gamers neither need nor want.
The European Union is the worlds biggest market:t m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2266385.s
However, Europe has traditionally had much smaller sales of game consoles and computer systems than the United States. More game consoles, however, are sold in Europe than in Japan.
As of december 2004, The Sony PS2 had sold 29.06m in Europe, 32.86m in USA and 19.47m in Japan. Given that the launch was later in Europe, it could have sold more in Europa than the US by now Granted, the Xbox have sold more than twice as many units in the US as in Europe.
Also, the EU being the largest market in the world, means that the POTENTIAL for further sales in Europe is larger than the potential for the US. Focusing on the EU as a target market could lead to massive future incomes. Any company would be complete and utter idiots to ignore this market.
But perhaps the same sale figures are deflated somewhat by the fact that a lot of people who wanted a PSP will have already had one imported - like me, from Hong Kong or America/Canada. The global sales figures will be the only interesting ones here (unless you're an economist) - the same applies to games.
That normally makes [the shop] think again. If it doesn't try Citizens Advice or even a solicitor.
The magic words you are looking for are "Trading Standards", and usually just the threat is good enough to get some action out of the vendor.
Whats the typical age of a PSP owner? 15+, 20+? Its very unlikely that any parent would stump up so much money for their little kids to have a portable gaming system.
This is where Nintendo comes up trumps - they are cheaper, have a great range of simpler games, suitable for smaller children (my child is 4 this month, he loves the GBC), and the really, really crutial point, is that battery life on the gameboys is better than the PSP, so you don't have the problem with your son/daughter coming along asking for "more batteries please, daddy".
The PSP is more 'lickable' than DS: the promise of better graphics, movies everywhere, superior sound, hackable etc make it a better choice.
That's irrelevant though to the fact that DS games are more fun, simply because Nintendo is better at making games.
Actually, this device WANTS more than games. There's a lot of potential here for all kinds of third party/community apps. Granted, text input is by way of an onscreen "keyboard" which is more like a phone's pad than anything, but with features like WiFi and a browser there are all kinds of things that could be done from the community if Sony would release to the public a (legal, approved) SDK for it.
A couple of things could be done to improve the unit itself, number one being the addition of a larger (in GB, not dimension) hard drive, making some of the buttons more sturdy feeling (R1 and L1 both feel like they could fall right out of the unit) and some other minor things.
R(k)
Yes, they are. THe law that you quoted backs me up as the device in question is a Class II TFT screen - you cannot expect perfection on a device that is already presented as not guaranteed to be perfect, so the screen would conform to contract and meet the rest of the criteria under the Sales of Goods act so long as the dead pixel count conforms to the Class II criteria. This is what a reasonable person would consider satisfactory. You cannot expect goods to conform to higher standards than they are sold to. Under this case a minor defect DOES NOT include dead pixels as the panel conforms to a certain specification and that specification is the extent to which the law will protect you, not some arbitrary criteria that you demand.
If they don't follow up with more interesting games then the foot may be planted firmly in the mouth. I bought a PSP a couple of weeks ago and so far I'm pretty happy with it playing Lumines, Wipeout Pure, and tooling around with the web browser, but I really want to see some really interesting stuff before the year is out. What I'd really like to see in the near term is Flash support for the browser which would suddenly make thousands of web games potentially playable on the PSP. I wonder if Sony is actually afraid of that?
In any case, it looks like the UK launch has gone pretty well for Sony. But they'd better not rest because quite honestly, the DS has the better stable of games right now.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
"That said... right now Nintendo's conceptual vision doesn't really line up with what I want to play. That's all. If I still owned a DS, right now I'd probably be really excited about Nintendogs and Electroplankton. And I doubt I could look at myself in the mirror without crying. :)"
Actually, you saying this says more about you than you actually playing these games. Nintendogs and Electroplankton are fun, relaxing and interesting experiences. No, you don't kill people, jack cars, score touchdowns, etc. but since when was there a limited scope of what games were supposed to be to be considered fun. I think what's out for the DS right now is far more interesting and creative than what's out for the PSP. And don't get me started on the analog nub. I've owned a PSP. I sold it because the analog nub was an ergonomic nightmare for me. I'm a computer programmer so my hands and arms give me trouble sometimes. So I have to stick to games that don't. And the DS touch-screen games are great in that respect. Plus they're fun and original and isn't that the point of gaming?
The number one game in the UK before Ridge Racer(PSP) was Brian Lara International Cricket 2005?! No fucking wonder it's a hit!
I hear European gamers bitch and whine and moan about how things take forever to get over to them. When the latest and greatest is out for six months to a year before you can touch it, it creates pent up demand.
I'm not making a comment on one system versus another here. I'm just trying to say that people in Europe are a completely different market from the US. They've been itching to get this for a long while, plus it had more games available than launch any other location, plus people had time to save up their £ AFTER deciding which system they wanted to try.
As someone else said here, competition is good, and nobody's dropping out of the handheld market any time soon.