I see many comments such as "no one has taken this much of the gameboy's market share" and "no one has stayed in the race this long," but to be honest, that is one of the most insignificant factors in this discussion (in my opinion.) Obviously, when you go to this sites homepage, you see the PSP's bar is basically half of the DS's, and hey that's actually pretty good against the Nintendo dominated handheld market. But the only significance hardware sales has is a factor in this equation:
Hardware sales + X = Software sales (profit)
More often than not, Hardware sales is the most important factor in that equation, so typically, hardware sales and the final out come (software sales) coincide with each other. But for the PSP, factor X is throwing off the equation darastically. Factor X is the homebrew, multimedia, piracy, emulation aspect of the PSP which is clearly over powering the equation and preventing the software sales from being where they should be. So while Hardware sales are quite impressive, the most important factor (in my opinion) is software sales, which is no where near where it should be. The only significance (in my opinion) that hardware sales presents is the install base for the system, and the install base presents a higher potential of consumers to buy games. If they aren't buying the games, then that negates any merit the hardware sales have in regards to a system being a success.
Here's a video from my band's last show Check out more (bigger) videos here http://www.youtube.com/user/icemanout
