PSP shipments down 75%; Sony refuses to give up
by Andrew Yoon 
{ Jan 30th 2007 at 1:38PM }
Momentum is clearly not on Sony's side. Newly released figures today revealed that the PSP shipped 1.76 million units the holiday period from October to December. While that's certainly not a small amount, it's dwarfed by the incredible performance of the PSP the year before, where the system shipped 6.22 million units.In spite of significantly weakening hardware performance, gamers are still buying games for the system, much to Sony's relief. Software sales were up 24% for this quarter compared to last year, reaching 21.2 million units.
Sony CFO, Nobuyuki Oneda commented on the surprising plummet in PSP sales by stating that Sony will not give up on the platform. He noted that Sony is still implementing new ideas for the constantly evolving system. For the sake of PSP fans everywhere, let's hope that they can reinvigorate the public opinion of the system.
[Via IGN]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jomolungma @ Jan 30th 2007 1:50PM
want to reinvigorate public interest? slim it down, re-imagine the controls, add a hard drive, reduce the cost and have developers release compelling games at a more competitive price...
Alien @ Jan 31st 2007 7:10AM
Please Sony , dont , just dont let this end like this , this is the best console ever , and it was ment to be a winner :(
dirtyone @ Jan 30th 2007 1:57PM
drop the price and i will buy one enuff said
dirtyone @ Jan 30th 2007 1:58PM
oh and stop the retarded marketing
Dadidito @ Jan 30th 2007 2:07PM
I am sending my psp in for repair today. Plan on keeping it even if support dies. Hell my dreamcast and Saturn (Sega Consoles forever!) still work and are enjoyed. I see the PSP being an ebay fave for years to come even if it dies an early and sad death.
The Poet @ Jan 30th 2007 2:12PM
give it 2 screens, make the bottom one touchscreen, lower the price, make it different colors, and oh yeah make it so that developers can actually make GOOD DECENT MONEY SPENDING games on it, that dont suck or take a lifetime to load. THAT SHOULD SELL THEM psps.
oh wait....this is exactly what the DSlite is. Damn...chalk that idea of the board...on the next...Raising that WHITE FLAG already.
Strangler @ Jan 30th 2007 2:24PM
"developers can actually make GOOD DECENT MONEY SPENDING games on it"
ypu know just how expensive it is to make ps3 games? yet devleoeprs continue to do it. Price isnt the reason developers dont make any original ip's on the psp, there must be some other motive.
TrekCycling @ Jan 30th 2007 2:42PM
It would be nice if they could reduce load times somehow and drop the price. As someone who has owned a DS I can honestly say that for me Lumines, LocoRoco and many other PSP exclusives make it a better system than Nintendogs and New Super Mario Brothers on the DS. But the DS is smaller, loads quickly and costs $100 less (counting the cost of a memory stick).
Joe @ Jan 30th 2007 3:01PM
I say Sony needs to lower the PSP to make the core PSP sell for 100 and the premium version for 150. If that was to happen the PSP would sell really well.
If you look at what games are out for the PSP you will see there are lots of great PSP games but no one buys them because of the price.
Jeff Cossey @ Jan 30th 2007 3:00PM
Drop the price SONY !!!!
Market the product SONY!!!!!
(retarded ads are NOT marketing it)
They must do this soon or it might spell doom for the
mighty PSP
Chaz @ Jan 30th 2007 3:06PM
There are just too many things that Sony can and should do to make the PSP the killer portable device. Unfortunately they arn't doing them and the homebrewers are. I'll keep my PSP, and I'll keep buying games, but until they start wowing me with the official firmwares and features it'll be OE firmwares and homebrew for me.
john @ Jan 30th 2007 3:22PM
99% sure Sony is not going to drop the prices....
instead, they should make a low cost (or free) anti-bricker (or security patches for anti-bricking) for those of us with a bricked psp from the official updates...(low battery 40%)
Mrfreezie @ Jan 30th 2007 3:44PM
Wow, I think PSPFanboy just said that the PSP is dying. That makes me sad.. :(
gregori0 @ Jan 30th 2007 4:08PM
Price slash is a must, both on the hardware ($100-$150) and software ($20-25). Basically, match the Big N's pricing stragey.
After that, listen to the customer, relax their iron fist policy on certain PSP features, including full res video playback, more codec support (avi!!), direct PS1 game download, movie download (drop the UMD movie SONY).......
There are so many things SONY can do without costing them a penny, just listen to your customers for a change.
nerdXcore @ Jan 30th 2007 5:04PM
I was going to comment, but it looks like Jeff Cossey already said what was on my mind.
Seriously Sony, you have created an amazing product. Stop crippling its features and stop "marketing" it in such a way that treats your customers like 3-year-olds.
Why should that be so difficult?
Nonbeliever @ Jan 30th 2007 4:46PM
I work in a Southern California High School and it seems like every 3rd student has a PSP. We have lunch time tournaments in my classroom. So if sales are down it must not be here, unless everyone already has one. For the record I NEVER see a DS with High School kids.
txa1265 @ Jan 30th 2007 4:59PM
An article over at PocketGamer tells the grim tale in even more gory detail:
"The territory breakdown (an appropriate word here, sadly) makes particularly grim reading for PSP's US fans.
PSP shipments for Q3 in Japan were 0.9 million (compared to 1.4 million in the same period in 2005), Europe took 0.9 million (compared to 3.2 million in 2005), but the real stinker was America.
Previously swallowing up almost 1.7 million PSPs in Q3 2005, the run up to Christmas 2006 saw Sony ship a mere 100,000 PSPs to the territory."
Amazing ... the US has always been the hotspot, and it is known that the surge in Japanese sales was related to MGS release there. But 100k units ... perhaps the PSP really is d0med! ;)
pixelator @ Jan 30th 2007 5:40PM
Didn't take long for Poet and other DS fanboys to start the trolling.
Honestly, I thought the PSP did fine this Christmas - especially in the last couple of weeks, when it just about matched the DS sales according to the portion that NPD tracks. Wasn't everyone just commenting a couple of weeks ago how well the PSP sold over that period?
Ah well, who cares. People like Poet will continue to slam the PSP for having poor games, needing a touchscreen and so forth, while people like me will simply continue to buy and play the great games it already has.
Meanwhile, the news that software sales rose has gone totally overlooked -- perhaps the best news Sony could've gotten this holiday season. That's the bottom line potential publishers look at most.
Kenban @ Jan 30th 2007 6:37PM
There is a reason for the small number of shipped units. The stores are overstocked. People have been saying this for months on some forums. The sales figures and data on sites like vgcharts backs it up as well. According to Sony 24.7 million PSP's have shipped total. Yet total sales are only a little over 20 million (based on adding up all regions sales figures). I expect we are going to continue to see low shipments for another quarter at least while stores get rid of the stock they already have on hand. My thinking is fully stocked shelves is around 2-3 million which there looks to be around 4-5 million unsold right now.
Also there are some big games coming for both the DS and the PSP this year so its going to be interesting looking at sales figures for both once they start coming out.
-=TRÉKSTER=- @ Jan 30th 2007 6:18PM
#6 Poet=Idiot DSFanboy
You are such a fool if you think the PSP does not sell because it is not like your piece of shit DS.
I should prolly take it easy on you as you are most likely a 8 year old who's mommy would not buy him a PSP, so you come here to a PSP fanpage to try to slam a superior product. Go away DSfanboy you are not welcome. Go back to your DS Mario Dreamland as we don't welcome your utterly moronic ignorant comments.
TrekCycling @ Jan 30th 2007 6:21PM
Wondering about shipped vs. sold. Because I also seem to remember the PSP selling well during the holidays. Is it possible it sold well, but there was excess supply, thus it didn't ship as much?
ruben @ Jan 30th 2007 6:42PM
I don't understand why people say the PSP is selling poorly, here in the US it has 42% of the market compared to DS. How is that a failure, the only real country where it is getting it's ass kicked is Japan.
Having said that I do not understand why we (the U.S.) don't get any of the color variations or special downloads that have on the European site. We're PSP's best customers, yet we get none of the niceties.
stylemo @ Jan 30th 2007 10:07PM
I hope SONY starts to market the product. I mean advertise it. I rarely see PSP advertisements and/or teasers. I WISH Sony will take the PSP into Priority.
Zio @ Jan 31st 2007 2:03AM
I have DS & PSP and I really don't see why DS sells so much. DS really have some great games (Castlevania is my favorite), but I like my PSP much better and I'm not even using homebrew! Glad to hear that Sony refuses to give up! :>
Kade Storm @ Jan 31st 2007 7:22AM
"Slim it down." - Someone.
Uh, what?
Does thou fancy a technological marvel the visage of a cracker, thin and nimble that could nestle into the dainty palms of thy human hands?
It's a friggin' anorexic console - thin enough! Any thinner and I'd need to hold it up with a pair of tweezers! That is just creepy.
I say lower the price of the games, a bit! That would seriously rock, especially considering how so many PS2 games are easily attainable at cheap prices. Not saying that it's the same thing, but some players might go for a PSP copy if it had an attractive price tag.
txa1265 @ Jan 31st 2007 9:35AM
First, I think (as pixelator mentioned) that the increased 'attach rate' (software sales) is a *VERY GOOD THING* - it means that more games are gaining traction. Regardless of audio, movies, homebrew, etc, the PSP is at its heart a gaming system and unless the games start selling at a much better 'games per system' rate than the system is as 'd0m3d' as the DS Fanbois would have you believe.
*However* ...
Individual numbers mean much less than overall trends, so here are a few (related to US sales only):
- Ruben points out a 58:42 market share, which is pretty much true (excluding the ~12 million GBA sold during the time since the DS launch, making the share 43:34:23 for GBA/DS/PSP).
But those numbers still miss the trend:
- The DS having an earlier launch gave it a ~1.5Million system lead by the PSP launch. But a pretty much total lack of decent games had meant that the GBA was outselling the DS ~3:1 after Christmas.
- The PSP whittled the DS *total sales* lead from >1.5 million to
txa1265 @ Jan 31st 2007 9:36AM
- After reaching parity, PSP & DS monthly totals were equal within +/-50,000 for *10 MONTHS* (8/05-6/06).
- At the end of 2005 the PSP led the DS in both US and Worldwide 'shipments', and was more or less equal (or slightly better) in terms of confirmed sales.
- Look at these numbers as of the end of March 2006:
PSP - 17.03 million
Nintendo DS - 16.73 million
So we have a situation in which the PSP *was* doing better than the DS as little as 9 months ago.
Yet look at the end of 2006 figures: US / World
PSP - 24.7MM / 6.6MM
DS - 35.61MM / 9.3MM
So what does this all mean?
- Well, it is fairly obvious that the PSP is getting whooped in sales, but is still doing pretty darn well.
- The price situation 9 months ago wasn't much different than it is now - I don't think price alone is the factor for increasing PSP sales.
- People need to realize that this isn't a 'zero sum game' any more than it is for consoles. Many houses have more than one console, and plenty of kids have more than one handheld. That mentality alone allows them (and their parents - especially people like my wife!) to see the systems as having different and complementary features that make each useful in their own way.
- Further to that - I believe that pushing the non-gaming functions *hurts* the PSP is some ways. People don't usually have more than one cell phone or MP3 player or PDA ... but as I say, having a GBA & DS is pretty common for the under 10 crowd my kids are part of.
- I hope that Sony gets their stuff together in terms of marketing. This is where Nintendo is really cleaning up. Some here call the DS 'kiddie', but they are missing the point totally. The DS and its games are marketed as *FUN FOR EVERYONE* - the commercials just ooze that sense of fun, and many of the games appeal to people who are not traditional gamers.
- In that regard the DS has tremendous 'viral self-marketing'. I look again at my nongamer wife. We were at the store Wii-hunting (my kids got a wad of cash from their grandmother ... don't ask) and Cooking Mama was $20. The kids were picking up some other stuff, and my wife decided to grab Cooking Mama since she had seen/heard so much about it. She spent the entire hour ride home that day glued to the DS and has actually taken it to bed rather than reading a book ... now she wants a nice Coral Pink DS of her own.
- But perhaps Sony doesn't want to be *her* game company. That is fine - I know that whenever commercials for PSP games come on she tunes out as they are the types of games (violent action) that she *HATES*. The important thing is for Sony to decide what market they want, properly segment it and properly market to it.
I guess that is enough for now ... ;)
Kenban @ Jan 31st 2007 11:51AM
tax1265 your comparing the wrong numbers. For example the 35.61 million for the DS is SOLD to end users. The PSP's 24.7 million is shipped/sold to stores. Only a little over 20 million PSP's have been sold to consumers. Not sure why people think this is the end of the world though. Within a few months the PSP will have outsold both the xbox and gamecube.
txa1265 @ Jan 31st 2007 1:45PM
"For example the 35.61 million for the DS is SOLD to end users. The PSP's 24.7 million is shipped/sold to stores. Only a little over 20 million PSP's have been sold to consumers."
I blame Sony - they tend to obfuscate things with their pushing of 'shipping' numbers, which is typically something people do to inflate numbers - but they push them on stats sites so that they get floated around, making the PSP numbers look better than they are.
But as you say, that isn't the end of the world, or the real point of the matter.
So what *is* the real point? Who knows ... but the combination of software and hardware add up to mean *something* about the position of the PSP in the strongest market ... and the tale isn't good.
Looking at software (I suggest you look here - http://www.vgcharts.org/usatotals.php?name=&maker=&console=PSP), you will see:
- Top 25 DS games account for 21million sales.
- Top 25 PSP games account for 11 million sales
- Market share of games is ~66:34 DS to PSP ... this means that not only are the systems selling better but the games are selling disproportionately better as well. This is the so-called attach rate.
Looking at the numbers, some of them are depressing - Killzone: Liberation sold ~45,000 copies ?!?! That is sad ...