Should the PSP be viewed as a succes or a failure?

[fishamaphone]

Biggerboat said:

fishamaphone said:

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? Does it perform any worse than every other console in any one category? No. 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.

I'm not so sure it established a new brand as PS was obviously well known. If it did then so did GBA, GBPocket, SNES, 360 etc. I'm not so sure about the 3 units per PSP, taking just million+sellers we have an attach rate of about 0.75 meaning the sub-million sellers have a lot of ground to make up to get to an attach rate of even 2 never mind 3. Following on from this fact I'd hazard an outside bet that the system has a worse attach rate than nearly any game system in history, though I'm aware I could be wrong.

 

 Every GB was an extension of the GB brand, and to an extent, so was the DS.  Nintendo was known for handhelds.  Sony was not.  The PSP established a handheld brand, just like the iPod established a MP3 player brand.  It wasn't an extension of the iMac, even though they shared the same "i" name.  A brand is more than a name.  Or is Packard Bell part of the Hewlett-Packard brand?

As for attach rates, check the 360 which suposedly has attach rates in excess of 6, but counting million sellers only gets you about 2.5.  There are a lot of PSP games out there, and I'd assume a lot of them hover around the 900K mark.  I don't have accurate info on this, and like I said, it's an assumption, but it's a fair assumption.