z64dan said:
Well. I think you can pretty much add all of the PSP sales into a "Money Spent on Gaming" category. Since money is finite, Nintendo did not get THAT money, definitely. They would have had a much higher chance of getting any of that money, if people weren't already buying a PSP. |
OK, I gotta disagree here. "Money spent on gaming" is *really* a subset of "money spent on luxuries," and within that subset, the amount allotted is fluid. The decision could just as easily be "are we going to buy our kid a TV for his room or a PSP" as it is "are we going to buy our kid a DS or a PSP." People don't have "video game" budgets (aside from people like us who post on VG forums :-p). Sometimes the existence of a new product justifies expansion of "money spent on video games" within the larger "money spent on luxuries," and that person will just not go to Blockbuster as often for the next few months. But Nintendo didn't lose any money, because the money would have gone to Blockbuster instead of Sony, not to Nintendo.
Granted, this isn't universal, and there *are* instances where +1 for Sony means -1 for Nintendo, but the statement "Since money is finite, Nintendo did not get THAT money, definitely" is false.
As for PSP's success or failure... both of those words need to be retired from video games. Video game failures include: Virtual Boy, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast. Video game successes include: NES, Game Boy, PS1. As of today, almost everything else can be considered "in between." Even N64, which lost Nintendo their market dominance and almost all of their 3rd-party relations, had higher software attach rates and higher profit margins than the PS1. And on the flip side, even the PS2 was really just an extension of the PS1, and not really a success in and of itself.
What did the PSP do? The PSP sold 20 million units over the course of about 30 months. The PSP established a new brand. The PSP sells software (I don't know how much, but I assume attach rates above 3 units of software per PSP). Does perform better than every other console in any one category? No. Does it perform any worse than every other console in any one category? Maybe UMD movies, but I don't think that was ever really a *main* selling point. If we were to draw out a bell curve, I'd put PSP about half a standard deviation above the mean, right around GC and Xbox, all circumstances considered. More success than failure, but not a success by any stretch of the imagination.
