Sony Gives the Game Away

Lol, PSP needs all the help it can get right now. Come on guys, are you really surprised by Sony copying what Nintendo do first? No, me neither.

Sony are on damage limitation against the DS impact in japan and they aren't used to playing second fiddle, but you live and learn.

Don't matter what they do to change things for PSP (I don't even think a hard drive based PSP would be worth it, like the normal one isn't already expensive enough), IMO this is already a major victory for Nintendo.

Oh well another skillful copycat move by the masters of .. well, copycating?
Comming up next... a touchscreen cover!!
:P

truth is that PSP is selling a lot in the western world.Perhaps they are close to catching up with DS.People like shiny things. And our side of the globe are typical hype victims :)

Yeah, not surprised at all. Sony can't do a single thing on their own that's good. Let's look at their original products... The Eyetoy, which is "Do some jumping jacks and you win every game." And....wait for it...the boomerang controller? They invent anything else?

The mainstream console video games market.

Now, that comment hold up to close examination for all of, maybe... three seconds. If you don't examine it too closely.

Lets face it 10 years ago Sony had no offering in the video games market. So I guess, in a way, you are correct. They weren't second fiddle, they were third behind Sega and Nintendo. Maybe even fourth behind the Commodore GS64.

Of course Sony is used to being second fiddle.

You damage your own credibility to suggest otherwise. Any argument predicated on such an assertion is a very flimsy one.

This isn't about Sony's entire corporate functions. It's just the fact that Sony really underestimated the handheld market and Nintendo's know-how in it.

The DS-launch wasn't really good either with quite a drought afterwards, the thing that really killed the PSP is that it sucked even more and had a even longer drought. The japs probably don't consider the damn thing a gamemachine looking at their gamecharts.

The question remains: how long can Sony keep doing this catch-up? Every one here on these forums can do the math and knows Sony is losing bucketloads of money on the PSP. The handheld market is Nintendo's huge piggybank and they know how to play it the best and still run a profit. They won't give it up anytime and pushing Sony in these kind of catch-ups will drain the allready heavy bleeding behemoth to the edge.

Sony really only has the Cell and Blu-Ray to keep it alive IF they succeed because of all the divisions that are counting on it. IF not its going to get sliced up like fresh baked cake at juniorscout summercamp.

Presumably since the PSP has as many titles in the Japanese top 50 as the GBA at the moment, they don't consider the GBA to be a gaming machine either? It has more titles in the top 50 than the GameCube, so that can't be a gaming machine.


Nobody here, unless they work for Sony in the department that makes the PSP, knows the maths. We have wild speculation on the costs of making the device versus the price it's selling for. We have vague impressions of the total numbers sold outside of Japan. We also only have vague impressions of the games and movie units sold and we have no idea what Sony's cut of the sales of those, or of the hardware, actually are.

The only place we have solid hardware sales figures for is Japan. There, over the period of its launch, the PSP has outsold everything else combined except the DS and PS2. Let me say that another way, add up the sales of the GBA, GBA-SP, GB Micro, GameCube and XBox since the PSP has been available and they don't match the sales of the PSP.

In Japan only the DS and PS2 have outsold the PSP in the time that the PSP has been available. In the UK, the PSP had the best launch of any console ever, beating the DS's launch by 98,000 units, over twice as many PSPs were sold as DSs.

None of that makes me think that the PSP is a failure. It hasn't done as well as the DS, true. It probably hasn't done as well as Sony wanted it to, true. But it has probably done well enough to make it a profitable product in a year or so.

Comparing a old system games sales and a new system game sales who sells better then the old one is not a valid point and actually shows that yes the PSP is not doing well as a gamemachine. You're ripping the absolute numbers out of context.

Still a pretty good foundation to assume that the japs don't see the PSP as a gamemachine but a portable hentaiwatcher that can by chance play games too.

Last time i checked the GBA (185 000) sold better then the PSP (150 000) in August in the States, DS numbers were unknown. More the fault of the damn sales watchdog over there then anyone else's.
What is known is that the gameratio of the PSP hardly reaches 1:2, UMD's are selling well though but don't know a ratio for that.
The problem about the PSP production cost is that Sony is cleverly covering them up. Sony's gaming division can actually say they're making a profit off the PSP but that doesn't mean the whole company Sony is making a profit on it (since the PSP is mostly produced in-house)
What i read so far makes me think that the company Sony loses 50-100 bucks per PSP, the game division sells it break-even (in their books since the other divisions sell them the parts at big loss).

I'm not saying the PSP is a failure, hell its selling more then the PS2 in Japan but all the products around it (games and UMD's) could not be selling enough to pull the whole operation out of the loss. Playing catch-up to Nintendo is not helping in that regard while the big N runs a profit on their operation like its baking cake.
I'm trying to give a perspective over here that Sony can't keep riding this loss-making train forever seeing the huge debt they got. Entering the market with a powerhouse like the PSP could be a mistake that puts another strain on the company's financial health and future.

In my eyes Cell and Blu-Ray are the only things that could keep Sony going or splitting.