Sony: No PSP in Europe for Several Months

Bugger!

There goes my late Easter present to myself! :-)

Ninendo won the lottery
Lack of a good plan in SCEE

Second Post!!!!!

This is a real big shame, especially to all who expected to have one as of when the DS launched.
Nintendo will take the lead to there advantage, but lets not be so hard on SONY, it may seem like a tortoise and hare race at the moment, i'm sure the war between the two will esculate as soon as PSP comes our way.

have faith people!

I'd expect anyone on this board who really wants one to just import one... unless you want to play UK region UMD movies, of course.

The PSP is, basically, a generation ahead of DS (N64 vs PS2), so even if it's months instead of weeks away, it's still gonna impress the public when it's eventually released.

Oh, far from it. Sony had a plan all along.

They have only just got PSP production up to speed to deal with Japanese demands, there was NEVER any chance they could do simultaneous US/Euro launches... so they just lied. The principle being that they could prevent people buying a DS by telling them that the PSP was nearly ready. Then, once it gets to March, let them down, but only by a few months... which they'll probably wait.

This has been a deliberate plot all along by SOny, in an attempt to spoil the DS lead to market.

I have a DS and a Jap PSP. The PSP is about 137,548 times better than the DS.



But first in the lame stakes.

Running a very close second, in those same stakes.

So Sony has so far sold only one million PSP units?! At GDC Nintendo said they had sold almost four million of DS, and expected to ship six million by the end of March... Sony is really digging themselves in deep so early in the game... I don't think they will recover from this. Nintendo has the "magic touch."

What a lot of wasted effort on the part of PSP developers who are going after the smaller market. Didn't we all know this would happen?

True, it's possible that once Nintendo get ahead with the DS in a few million more in sales that Sony won't recover from it. Perhaps PSP will do well when it's out but will it be enough to topple Nintendo.

When the public looks at the DS they don't see a handheld N64 like we hard core gamers do, they see a handheld that does 2D/3D games with a unique interface for gaming. They can see it's different and that the games will be different too. Where as you look at the sexy PSP and we've seen it all before since our PS2 can do the same or similar thing.

First Sony Harakiry

LOL maybe the new Euro Sony boss doesn't like Euro

This resemble the time when Nintendo took many wrong decisions, not taking in acount gamers dignity, we already saw their answer about the square button problem in the PSP, It was like: "It is your problem, take it or live it, or get use to this imperfection", then they realize of the big mistake of their answer and change it.

This prepotent attitud dosnt help.
Being in the first place for all this year can afect people and companyes.
They should tell the true: "we dont have enough hardware to distribute between USA and Europe market at the same time, so we will launch the PSP for Europes months later" .They should say this months ago, not to wait until the last minute. Of course the idea is to influence buyers so that they dont buy a DS , but hey, what about the honesty and respect toward buyers?

Look at the coments around the net from Europe , people craving and suffering cause theyr order is delayed, is not fair with buyers.

People from Canada who dont like the game which comes with the PSP and it is charged for $50, has to eat the game if they want to buy a PSP.

Sony should change their marketing strategies,

"I have a DS and a Jap PSP. The PSP is about 137,548 times better than the DS."

I have both (DS and PSP) plus PS2 and GameCUBE.
PSP is useless for me. In NO WAY PSP is better than DS (expect in theoretical technical terms) I play only PS2, GameCUBE and DS. STYLUS INPUT and longer battery-life just make DS far better handheld than PSP and with FAR GREATER POTENTIAL.

Or as a counterpoint;

When the public looks at the DS they don't see an innovative games console with touch, microphone and dual screens like we do, they see a small PDA with two screens that is supposed to be able to play good games, but currently mostly has "old" 2D games for it. They can see it's a PDA 'cos it uses one of those pen things. Where as you look at the sexy PSP and it's familiar because we can play the same games as on our PS2 and it's from Sony who are "cool".

Not saying I (fully) believe it, but the public are not you and I.

This is Sony failing to capitalise on an opportunity. We're four months behind the times with the DS, and it's a little more expensive than it reasonably should be. A £130 March launch for the PSP would have been killer. As it is, they're looking at the same catch-up game they face in the US. Whilst production limitations have obviously been a factor in this decision, it's a shame that we couldn't have had the choice so quickly.

However, don't be so quick to write Sony off. Nintendo may have four million sales under it's belt, but that's after a few months in Japan and four in the US. Sony has still yet to tap the US and European markets, both of which are very large, and the PSP is outselling the DS week after week in Japan. Remember: this is the company that knocked Sega off it's perch in the 32-bit generation whilst starting from second place, and vapourised a year-plus gap against a console with the most successful launch ever (at that point) in seemingly no time. Both the Playstation consoles were not the first of their generation to be released.

As for the public "getting" the appeal of the DS, I beg to differ. Looking at the games they're buying, we have an awkward conversion of a nearly decade-old game in the top DS slot, followed by a touch-screen sequel to a game that has seen three sequels (including this one) in less than two years. The third-highest DS game in the charts is a remake of a newer platformer, having only clocked up about half a decade since release. Then, we have an awful racing game.

Here's your inaugural DS top 10:

1/ SUPER MARIO 64 DS
2/ WARIO WARE TOUCHED!
3/ RAYMAN DS
4/ ASPHALT: URBAN GT
5/ POKEMON DASH
6/ THE URBZ: SIMS IN THE CITY
7/ TIGER WOODS PGA TOUR 2005
8/ PROJECT RUB
9/ ZOO KEEPER
10/ SPIDER-MAN 2

Stylistically and in terms of gameplay, Project Rub is the freshest thing on that system, yet it languishes below cash-in fests such as Pokemon Dash, The Urbz (epitome of a lazy conversion, this) and Tiger Woods. It's having trouble staying ahead of a movie tie-in for which the momentum died long ago. So what do we have? Sequels, remakes, cynical franchise cash-ins and unmitigated s**t, and that's just the top 5.

I'd say that the public hasn't gotten a single damned point Nintendo has been trying to make. If the DS is flooded with unimaginative toss in the coming months, we know exactly who to blame.

why does everyone target the launch titles? these are always crap, on every console i have ever owned i have never seen a selection of top titles for the launch

Super mario ds and warioware are good games, they are great launch titles. PSP doesn't have much more to offer at launch nothing does it. You have to wait for great titles its very early at the moment for both systems

Why waste ur top titles at a time when the unit is going to sell loads anyway, might as well save the best till later when things start to slow down to pick up sales again