Total sales for the generation

[Erik Aston]

AmishGramish said: I find it funny how some people just don't know how the market and consumers react, except for their little isolated group. Look at the DS, it's selling about 1.7:1 PSP in the U.S., and it will drop down to 1.5 or 1.3 when the price of the PSP drops. And the GBA and GBA SP sold about 60M cumulative, so I find it extremely unlikely for the entire PSP and DS consoles to sell double that.

First of all, GBA has sold about 80 million total. Second, lots of the big games on both PSP and DS don't hit the same market as GBA, so its not like the two systems are competing for 80 million potential customers period. The two systems combined have already well outsold the GBA in Japan, for example. As for the gap between the PSP and DS outside of Japan, it has only been getting larger. PSP outsold DS by over a million units in NA in 2005, almost catching up in overall sales. But in 2006, DS outsold PSP by over 2 million units in that territory. Will a price cut help PSP? Sure. But Nintendo are actually probably in a better position for a price cut themselves (less units on shelves they need to sell-through, already seeing more profit from both hardware and software), which would get them down to that magical 100USD mark. And they've got Pokemon coming up, along with Diddy Kong and Wario and a slew of Squeenix games which could push them up to GBA type numbers in NA. (They've already got GBA numbers in Europe, and GBA x2 numbers in Japan.) Plus at this point, how are Sony going to get more support for PSP when it has longer dev times and a much smaller installed base? And what do they have coming up to compete with Pokemon? Ratchet and Clank? I think this war is over; the gap is just going to get larger. Depending on when each company's next handheld comes out, I see DS selling between 80-100+ million, and PSP around 40-45 million.

The price of the PS3 and PSP are the highest factor in the sales, and Sony would have to be extremely stupid to not to drop the price in 07.

Considering they aren't making any money as is, it'd be stupid of them TO drop the price. The suits at Sony aren't going to be agreeable to losing MORE, when the PS division is already burning the profits of the whole rest of the company. As PS2 dies, and PS3 doesn't promise profits any time soon, the division is going to have to look to PSP to keep them from putting up Microsoft-style losses in the long term.

And when the PSP has a lot better year than the DS, in terms of higher ratings of games and more games that are rated, you have to see that the tides will probably change, or at least move a lot more towards the PSP when the price falls.

Or you could take that as a sign that videogame reviewers are out of touch with the DS. Many of the key DS games are aimed at non-gamers. Its no surprise that the traditional gamers (who do most of the reviews out there) rank traditional games higher than "non-games."

I can see this happening for the PS3, because a lot of people aren't willing to pay $600 or $500 for a PS3 right now, but will be willing to pay $400 or $500 for a PS3 now. That's basically all you hear about the talk about the PS3 and PSP, in that they are too expensive. Barely anyone talks about how the PSP has had crap for games (even though it has had a better year than the DS), and most talk about how it's too expensive. The PS3, most people just say it's not worth $600 or $500, but a lot of them would be willing to spend that much if it had a lot of AAA games.

Most of the talk I've heard around PS3 is that its too expensive, while the talk around PSP is that the games don't make sense for a handheld, even if they are great games.