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

[omgwtfbbq]

Biggerboat said:

mrstickball said:

PSP attach ratios for software are NOT that great. It's around 3.0. Trust me, I've checked. Just add up the past oh, 1 year of PSP software history in Japan and divide by total sales then, and you'll get a general, fairly accurate picture.

However, to the PSP's advantage, it does have UMDs that increase attach ratios for a unique type of software to the PSP. I assume the UMD attach rate is around 1.0 for purchased UMD movies, give or take.

Not that I don't trust you but basing an attach rate on 1 year of a console's life in 1 territory isn't necessarily going to yield any more accurate results than my, admittedly crude calculation. Have more abundant, better titles been releases in year 2 than year 1? Do Japanese PSP owners tend to depend on homebrew and piracy less than other regions? Are some games much bigger hits in Japan than elsewhere(I'm thinking MH2 here)? All we know for sure is that PSP's attach rate is low and that this makes the platform very unattractive to developers and paints a bleak picture for future releases, I don't see how this view can be questioned.

Including UMD's in the attach ratio's is only going to convince movie studios not game developers and those are who ultimately decide the fate of any system.

Of course, there's no need for such a rough estimate since the lifetime hardware and software sales are available for Japan. And the attach rate is around 2.0 (11.6Million software, 5.7Million hardware). Unfortunately, American total hardware sales are not available, so the same calculation cannot be performed. But when that's compared to the DS attach rate of 4.0, which is around the same age, shows that it's struggling to sell software (at least in Japan)