Sony Shipped 100,000 PSPs to North America during Holiday Season

PSP sales/shipments started slowing down like 2 or 3 quarters ago. Sony shipped a lot of PSPs so that they could say they shipped more systems than the DS sold (so then you get articles that said "The DS has sold 19M, while Sony has shipped 20M PSPs."). It caught up with them, and since then, shipments have been really low in order to balance things out.

It definitely needs something to boost sales. I prefer just a simple price cut, but they might do some sort of redesign (or both). It could get to 40M-50M systems or so, which is pretty good for Sony, although the DS will probably sell around twice that....in Japan alone (OK, it may not be that crazy ).

BTW, I just want to say that article sure had a lot of misleading stats or numbers that were just plain wrong. Not even sure how they got some of them. Nothing really changes the point of the article, except for the fact that they were using shipped games with shipped PSPs to conclude that PSP owners were buying a lot of games (~4 games per PSP "sold"). Um...someone is missing one important piece of the puzzle here.

 

Attach rate might have gone up since hardware sales have gone WAY down. I haven't really paid much attention to overall PSP software sales, but a lot of games for it bombed this past year. PSP games were rarely in the top 20 in the later half of the year IIRC, while games for every other platform were.

If they redesign the PSP, they'll probably keep the price the same or increase it. I doubt they'll accept anything other than MS pro duos (unless they want to change the size and speeds for memory formats that the PSP can handle), although I wouldn't doubt it if it included 4GB-8GB of flash memory.

I think of this as a redesigned PSP and not a PSP2 though. PSP2 would have a lot of changes probably (including the possibility of accepting multiple media formats and some control modifications...probably no UMD drive either). That probably won't be for a while...I hope.

It would be interesting to see if it had a Cell processor, and if so, how it would work in a portable.

 

I guess it's just too expensive for the kiddie market.

I've played the crap out of my PSP and have bought about 15 games for it. It's the perfect entertainment vehicle for airplanes, long car trips, or just being in the same room with my wife instead of having to go somewhere else to play games. A better D-pad would have been nice, but that's really my only complaint.