| theprof00 said: It's not so mucha simple observation as it is a simplistic one. Please explain the first paragraph. How does one not get a good impression of what sells on a sytem given the top selling games in the territory? I didn't mean so much that the psp never had western support,but that the western support was so minimal compared to what vita is receiving. Even in comparison to the home consoles, it never received a shred. Comparitively to both what the home consoles got, and what vita is receiving, psp didn't get supported by the west. There are roughly 20m sales in each territory for psp. DS is 50m in NA and europe and 32 in japan. Obviously there is a problem in the west with psp. DS sales in comparison to Japan is roughly 56% higher in other territories. Looking at the top sellers for psp in western markets, the highest selling game is 2.56-2.66m. The highest in Japan is 4.66, a 75% difference. So interesting how a "successful handheld", like ds, should do 56% better in the west, and how the top selling DS game in Japans 6.3m vs PALs 10m vs and Americas 8.3m, 63% and 75% respectively. DS having consistently highesr sales of 50-60 percent in the west on both consoles and games, and psp's flatline of sales across regions means that there is a ratio of proportionality to population. This means that psp doesn't hit enough demographics in the west, likely due to a lack of popular genre titles. The highest selling fps on ps3 is 5m, and the highest selling GTA is 3.6, a nearly 40% difference, which will continue to grow as BlOPs is still selling. So, we have a system that should be performing roughly 50% better in the west, missing titles that deliver 40% better sales on consoles in the west than titles found on both platforms. |
Chart-toppers provide a disproportionate view of the software landscape because it doesn't show the dozens and hundreds of games that make up the hundreds of millions of software purchases that constitute the majority of sales.
Now we're getting somewhere interesting. Yes, there is a demographic problem here, but you're making two assumptions: one, that the PSP is disproportionately low in the West rather than being disproportionately high in Japan, and that the PSP's consumer ennui is only coming from its own library, rather than ennui stemming from its competition.
I see no particular reason to believe that the anomaly with the PSP's East/West appeal lies in the West; rather, I see it in Japan, where the PSP's unusual level of popularity has been sustained for a while now. DS games in Japan and DS games in the West, near the top of the charts, are roughly the same: as you said before, Nintendo is Nintendo is Nintendo, and while there is a dichotomy for certain title appeal based on region (the Americas love Ben 10, EU loves Layton, Japan loves Beat Train Lolicon) we can see through analyzing hardware trends that Nintendo software is the primary hardware driver of the DS. Now that's not the case for the PSP, obviously, and the "minor" titles on DS are the majorest titles for the PSP. Now obviously there's Monster Hunter and certain other Japanese properties that drive in Japan, but we also see that these same titles do not have the universal appeal that Nintendo games do.
Let's pretend, then, that the PSP needs Western titles - something beyond the Gods of War, the Calls of Duty, and the Grand Theft Autos in order to support itself. But then, on the same token, we also have to acknowledge that it did get those titles, and in some cases they sold rather well - GTA Liberty City Stories, off the top of my head, has an attach rate of almost 10% while selling little or nothing in Japan. So obviously PSP owners were buying these games. So what happened?
Competition happened. See, PSP was fighting a battle on two fronts: it had to compete for the handheld buyer while at the same time establishing its own identity as a console replacement. Therein lies the real problem of the PSP, and I think it's going to end up being the real problem of the Vita.
When it comes to the handheld experience, nobody is going to match Nintendo within the context of dedicated handheld consoles. It's not even really worth it to try, and would require the iOS platform to begin to come close (at which point you're no longer a dedicated handheld console anyway). Hell, Sony seems to have given up on trying. You seem to assume that they have given up, and have repeated (often and vehemently) that it will be the console-style games that will really push Vita beyond what the PSP had.
But will it?
The problem with console-style games is that you are no longer competing against other handhelds, you are competing with consoles that get connected to TVs. Now obviously you believe that the Call of Duty gamer will see Call of Duty on the go and say, "Sweet! Call of Duty on the go! Gonna get me a piece of that!" After all, this is the first time a handheld would ever be able to really muster a facsimile of the console experience. You've got your joysticks, your ED screen, touch controls, some other things. What's stopping it?
I'll tell you what will be stopping it: the Xbox 360, the PS3, and their successors. People who want console-style games are going to want the best experiences possible, and in spite of everything it provides the Vita is not going to be able to deliver on that point.
Now I could be wrong, of course. Time is going to tell.
But it's just one more reason that Sony shouldn't be made more confident by the sales of the 3DS.
