Sony told to drop price or PSP to sleep with fishies?

R

Rainbow Man

Veteran
I was leisurely browsing Kotaku just now when I happened upon this eyebrow-raising (to say the least) news post.

Alledgedly certain unnamed but alledgedly big US retailers are getting antsy over PSP alledgedly not selling very well and is pushing for Sony to do something or else. Yeah the whole thing's kind of fuzzy on the specifics I know.

So is this nothing but bunk or what? If fall sales dropped an incredible 70+ percent last fall I think we would have heard more about it. But if true it's certainly serious business.

Still I think Sony's cavallier see-no-evil hear-no-evil attitude when it comes to demands for price drops is finally coming to an end. Well.. Hopefully anyway.

Peace.
 
Umm, that story seems all kinds of hogwash.

First of all, the DS is widely assumed to be burning up the charts right? Well, Dec 2006, it sold 1.6m to PSP's 953,000 (in USA).

So you're telling me selling close to 60% of an alledgedly obscenely popular product (DS) qaulifies another product as an abject failure? Not even mentioning the price differential, after which PSP probably has more dollars spent on it's hardware than DS does.

In fact LTD sales USA, PSP is probably at 66%-75% of DS, I'd say at an educated guess (think it was like 6.7m versus 9.something for DS)

Then, where the hell did 1up get that sony shipped 10k to retail? As I said, since published sales figures for Dec alone where at 950,000+, that makes absolutely ZERO sense. Now, it could, grasping at straws here, have been supposed to be 100,000, and it could have been a situation where Sony overshipped PSP so much previous Q's that very little needed to be shipped..but that begs all kinds of questions anyway such as, dont retailers order for themselves? And if they're selling units, do they really care when they were shipped? In other words, isn't it end sales that matter?

It also really makes one question, if retailer A decides to stop carrying PSP, wont they theoretically lose some sales to retailer B that does carry it? Isn't that the dynamic of why stores carry a product in the first place? As such, it would seem impossible for any retailer to threaten such a thing, as long as at least some retailers continued to carry the product, and the product is reaonably popular (as arguably, the PSP is)

This story may have some grain of truth on some level, but it really strikes me at a glance as a shoddy story.

Edit: basically this qoute:
Sony's PSP hardware shipments to retailers last Fall were down 72 percent over the year before, only a meager 10,000 units in the U.S.
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Is completely innacurate at some level, as there's absolutely no way you can make "72% reduction" and "10,000" fit with published PSP sales of 953,000 units in Dec alone. And you cant even make any sense of it if you assume they meant 100,000 or 1,000,000.
 
tongue_of_colicab said:
PSP hardware doesnt sell bad, its the software that does. Where do shops make money on? on software sales, not on hardware sales.
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It seems to me that every time the "PSP sales are crap" myth is busted, the "PSP software sales are crap" myth is brought it. This is another myth. Attach rates for PSP are around 4:1, pretty good for a handheld after just over 2 years of life. DS attach rates are slightly better, but much more heavily first-party oriented. Wouldn't surprise me if 3rd party attach rates are higher on the PSP than the DS.
 
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Well you only have 2 or 3 psp titels in the Japanese top30 at best, and those are usually towards the end. It was more or less the same for the US charts? Its not that I dont believe you, though I did tought the PSP attach rate would be more like 3, but I just wonder how insane the DS attach rate must be since it almost always has a ton of games in the charts (not to mention the load of smaller games).
 
tongue_of_colicab said:
Well you only have 2 or 3 psp titels in the Japanese top30 at best, and those are usually towards the end. It was more or less the same for the US charts? Its not that I dont believe you, though I did tought the PSP attach rate would be more like 3, but I just wonder how insane the DS attach rate must be since it almost always has a ton of games in the charts (not to mention the load of smaller games).
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The sales chart are an enormous illusion that likely created this myth in the first place. There are thousand of games out there, and whether you have 100 games with 10,000 sales each or 10 games with 100,000 sales each, total sales are the same. PSP is the former, DS is the latter. Since the top 30-50 only counts the top bracket of games, it's not a surprise that DS is dominating there. Plus havinge a 3 to 1 advantage in hardware sales in Japan helps too. Outside of Japan it's not as bright, and sales of third party games especially are pretty close.

Word of advice is don't trust those sales tracking sites on software. They're ridiculously off.
 
nonamer said:
The sales chart are an enormous illusion that likely created this myth in the first place. There are thousand of games out there, and whether you have 100 games with 10,000 sales each or 10 games with 100,000 sales each, total sales are the same. PSP is the former, DS is the latter. Since the top 30-50 only counts the top bracket of games, it's not a surprise that DS is dominating there. Plus havinge a 3 to 1 advantage in hardware sales in Japan helps too. Outside of Japan it's not as bright, and sales of third party games especially are pretty close.

Word of advice is don't trust those sales tracking sites on software. They're ridiculously off.
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If you look at the Top 30 charts, usually about 20 of those games are NDS. Also, sales numbers drop really sharp below the top 20, so I don't think your statement makes sense in this context.
 
Beafy said:
If you look at the Top 30 charts, usually about 20 of those games are NDS. Also, sales numbers drop really sharp below the top 20, so I don't think your statement makes sense in this context.
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Well 5,000 a week is about 250,000 over a year. Moving a few thousands units a week is pretty good, which is what the PSP game do but apparently not the DS games.
 
nonamer said:
Well 5,000 a week is about 250,000 over a year.
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It'd be very unlikely for sales to hiold steady over an entire year. It's a known fact interest in almost any game title declines sharply as time goes by. BVery few manage to reverse that trend and most that do manages it through price reductions.
*Edit: just consider the impact of shelf space an the number of new titles launched on a yearly basis. Where are you going to fit all those alledgedly slow-but-steady-selling games? They'd take up the entire handheld section and more.

Moving a few thousands units a week is pretty good, which is what the PSP game do but apparently not the DS games.
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Some would perhaps argue that's true; the DS titles move tens of thousands of units per week. :cool:

..But I don't want to get into any arguments. I like the PSP-. I'm gonna get me one some day when Sony ligtens up on the homebrew aspect of the machine.

Peace.
 
Rangers said:
Umm, that story seems all kinds of hogwash.

First of all, the DS is widely assumed to be burning up the charts right? Well, Dec 2006, it sold 1.6m to PSP's 953,000 (in USA).

So you're telling me selling close to 60% of an alledgedly obscenely popular product (DS) qaulifies another product as an abject failure? Not even mentioning the price differential, after which PSP probably has more dollars spent on it's hardware than DS does.
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DS was limited by a lack of stock in December while PSP wasn't. That followed through into January were DS sales were again brought down to PSP's level by lack of stock. Lets compare now that stock is again becoming more readily available for DS and still readily available for PSP.

February 2007:-

DS - 485,149
PSP - 175,651 (34% of DS sales)
 
Even then, it doesn't mean the system is dead. Does the industry really want to ditch 175,000 PSP sales a month. In February, when it's a slow period? They certainly didn't ditch XB and GC when they were seling but a small fraction of PS2s sales. Personally I think a PSP price drop is the best thing that could happen to the platform, and I'm gobsmacked it hasn't happened already. Sony could do lots to generate interest, but they're not pushing it. Are they production limited?? That doesn't mean the platform is no good though. There's what? 20 million PSPs to sell to, and millions more PSP owners each year. Why turn your back on that?
 
nonamer said:
The sales chart are an enormous illusion that likely created this myth in the first place. There are thousand of games out there, and whether you have 100 games with 10,000 sales each or 10 games with 100,000 sales each, total sales are the same. PSP is the former, DS is the latter. Since the top 30-50 only counts the top bracket of games, it's not a surprise that DS is dominating there. Plus havinge a 3 to 1 advantage in hardware sales in Japan helps too. Outside of Japan it's not as bright, and sales of third party games especially are pretty close.
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Beafy said:
If you look at the Top 30 charts, usually about 20 of those games are NDS. Also, sales numbers drop really sharp below the top 20, so I don't think your statement makes sense in this context.
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NoNamer's being a little paranoid (sales charts are not an "illusion", it just takes a keen eye to read them right.) But as for the Top 30 charts being dominated by DS, that's really just a factor of DS killing it than the PSP being a failure. PS2 games are hardly charting. You saw I think three Wii games last chart -- and even that was unique -- and it's the most talked-about console coming off its Christmas rush. DS is on a whole other scale right now. You have to look at the whole chart or at the individual charts if you want to know what's going on with a system's business, because blockbusters are not the norm.
 
camhostage said:
NoNamer's being a little paranoid (sales charts are not an "illusion", it just takes a keen eye to read them right.) But as for the Top 30 charts being dominated by DS, that's really just a factor of DS killing it than the PSP being a failure. PS2 games are hardly charting. You saw I think three Wii games last chart -- and even that was unique -- and it's the most talked-about console coming off its Christmas rush. DS is on a whole other scale right now. You have to look at the whole chart or at the individual charts if you want to know what's going on with a system's business, because blockbusters are not the norm.
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It's true that you can't use sales charts to guage sales numbers (unless you know the upper and lower sales numbers for the whole chart). However, NoNamer's suggestion that the PSP sales are anything other than craptacular--and in fact decent--needs to be back up by some hard evidence.
 
Sis said:
We still don't know if they're lumping in UMD sales. But regardless, those numbers don't look good. In FY05 they had 41.6 million units of software sold. In FY06, it looks like they'll do ~50 million. Perhaps a sub 4.0 attach rate is typical for a handheld? At the end of FY05 it looks like they had a sub 3.0 attach rate, sitting at 2.8. At the end of Q3 for FY06, it's skyrocketed to ~3.5, mostly due to what appears to be a significant drop in hardware sales while maintaining software sales. While looking at the chart, notice the FY06 Q3 shipments to NA of only 10,000 units, a drop from FY05 Q3 of 1.68 million.
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DS does sub 5.0 attach rate, according to a similar chart from Nintendo.com

Anyway, not sure why you piss and moan about having to back up your statements, it's part of the way a discussion works.
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You act like I'm lying but I'm not, nor do you have reason to believe so.
 
nonamer said:
DS does sub 5.0 attach rate, according to a similar chart from Nintendo.com
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Yep, looks like 4.33 according to this:

http://www.nintendo.com/corp/report/3QEnglishFinancial.pdf

But to put that in perspective, Nintendo has sold 154 million units of DS software by end of CY06, while it looks like Sony has sold approximately 90 million units, roughly in the same time period.

However, I do now agree that while PSP software sales aren't steller, they certainly aren't "utter crap".

You act like I'm lying but I'm not, nor do you have reason to believe so.
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I don't think I've ever implied anything other than "I think you're wrong."
 
Sis said:
Anyway, not sure why you piss and moan about having to back up your statements, it's part of the way a discussion works.
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Jeez, give him a break. He gave you a link to their financial statements. Now that you've actually looked at them I guess you noticed Sony made it nice and easy for you. Look at the section "Game" and then they nicely break out PSP software revenue.
 
Rainbow Man said:
Alledgedly certain unnamed but alledgedly big US retailers are getting antsy over PSP alledgedly not selling very well and is pushing for Sony to do something or else.
Click to expand...

LMAO, joke of the month!

A fly telling to an elephant "Move out of the way or else" would be a very good comparison.
 
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