It Must be the Time of Year – Sony Savages DS – Full Story Inside

Wow. Is August causing "gaming PMT"?

Do we have any sales figures for the two in recent months, because IIRC the DS used to outsell the PSP every week in Japan...

Google is my friend.

[Edit - just found August 15 - August 21 too]

Japanese hardware sales for August 15 - August 21:

1. DS: 80,945 (1,462,984)
2. PS2: 33,292 (1,322,678)
3. PSP: 23,923 (1,150,150)
4. GBASP: 16,721 (483,335)
5. GC: 3,960 (148,345)
6. GBA: 822 (17,219)
7. Xbox: 263 (9,458)

Japanese hardware sales for August 8 - August 14:

1. NDS - 103,095
2. PS2 - 37,041
3. PSP - 25,100
4. GBASP - 19,958
5. NGC - 3,799
6. GBA - 708
7. XBX - 202

Japanese hardware sales for August 1 - August 7:

1. NDS - 43,665
2. PS2 - 34,057
3. PSP - 20,571
4. GBASP - 12,107
5. NGC - 4,445
6. GBA - 419
7. XBX - 228

Note that the sales for the 8th - 14th coincide with the release of the red DS and Jump Superstars, so that's probably a blip.

So DS is outselling PSP and indeed everything else, including PS2.

Not bad for a gimick.

Just noticed, the figures in brackets in the first set of sales are the totals for 2005.

You guys got here first, but I was definately going to mention about how that guy is aparently not realizing that the DS is destroying his PSP's face. Not even to mention that most of the games people care about on DS aren't even out yet. It's bigger titles like Mario Kart, Hunters, Crossing, Mario and Luigi 2 and that new Super Mario Bros 2d platformer aren't even out yet. What the hell is PSP going to do when it's highly anticipated games come out?

bleeding throuhout the wound.

Quick math reveals that in the last week the DS outsold the PSP, PS2, GameCube, XBox, GBA SP, and GBA...PUT TOGETHER!

Yeah and the DS is outselling the PSP in america this year even though it came out last year and sold 1.4 million units last year, so its at least 1.4 million units ahead in America. Plus since the PSP isn't even out over here and i read months ago that the DS has passed a million units in euope the PSP is at least 3 million behind in worldwide sales and DS is still selling faster!

I'm not surprized in the slightest. Sony has been giving the succesful history of realizing that, when outmatched, it can still use anti-pr to prey on the minds of easily influenced people.

Sony has proven time and time again, that there is no way they could ever let their product speak for itself, they must try to lower the competition as much as possible in order for their stuff to even stand a chance.

Sony tried to rub off microsoft as no competition a month ago and now they're saying the same thing about nintendo, man it must be nice to have the market all to themselves!

Hopefully Sony will outplay themselves right into the smallest share of nextgen, I need not even say hopefully about the portable, Nintendo is, as you guys pointed out, crusing in the #1 slot. At least if I have anything to do with it, Sony will have 1 less dimbfounded comsumer clamoring for their inflated product.

http://forums.spong.com/en/html/forum/viewThread.jsp?message=15647&thread=2459&forum=8

this is pathetic.its clear what sony are doing,they feel threatend by the DS so they must attack it in the only way possible...its sad.

Dear mother of heaven!for the best performance he's to be awarded a pink NDS under the Christmas tree

It's funny. In my honest opinion I feel that both handhelds aren't living up to the hype each has been given, with that said however, I also believe that NDS is far more accessible than the PSP and also has a wider audience. I know a guy who's 42 yrs old, who owns a high end PC and a PS2 yet he was still very intrigued by the touch screen even though he's never played Pokemon. For me, it seems that the PSP caters to a very specific market, one which is tech saavy, needless to say not everyone is, especially gamers on the run.
I also find it funny that Pokemon hasn't even made a splash on NDS yet and Sony's writing off the DS's sales as pokemon related. Right now it's a case of good first party games, and that's what the DS has. It may change in the future but that's a large reason why the DS is outselling the PSP even in the technical world of North America.

I'd suggest to Sony and their employees that they should shut up instead of slagging off their competition. I haven't read the interview that this guy's comments are quoted from but I'd really like to have asked him a question.
"What is the point of the PSP?"
I don't want to sound anti psp because I'm not, it's a nice looking system and I'd like to see it reach it's potential.
I've said it several times on this forum that there's some really good looking software coming out (pro evo, virtua tennis..) but who is it aimed at and what is it supposed to do? Are Sony going to try to make all their profits out of UMD movie discs or extra memory stick duos?

And of the games that look good, they are all too much like regular console games. If I owned a PS2 then I'm not so sure I'd be that interested in most of them as I could get the same title without having to spend on new hardware I'm also unlikely to be taking it out places so it being portable or not makes no difference to me.

It's no fluke that the DS does so well. It has a control system that is totally transparent. If you can hold a pen (or blow) then you can play it and there is a range of software to cater for all sorts of tastes and all sorts of gamers. That is something that I think Sony should spend their time and their money working on before trying to put others down.

I've just re-read the MCV article and, to be honest, Phil Harrison has a bit of a point.

Not that the DS is an irrelevance, because he didn't say that.

He actually said "The idea of a handheld rivalry with Nintendo is an irrelevance", "Those formats don't appear in our planning", or at least that's what he was quoted as saying.

MCV are the ones who spun it with a headline of "The competition is irrelevant".

Now it's true that the whole tone of the interview could have lead MCV to the understanding that Phil thinks the DS and GBA are irrelevant, but that's not what their article says. The article says that Sony aren't planning on directly competing with GBA and DS.

The whole "It's not a fair comparison; not fair on them..." quote is a bit high-handed, but he never calls the DS an irrelevance.

The thing is, and here I'm speaking from my own perspective, so bear with me, the DS and the PSP are not direct competitors. Sure they are both handheld games consoles, but that's where the comparisons stop.

The DS is trying to expand the handheld market into the non-gamers by hosting easy to play games that only last a few minutes. Although, the non-skippable intros to the games in Warioware Touched annoyed the hell out of me.

The PSP is trying to do for the handheld market what the PS1 did for the under the TV market - expand it into the lifestyle market. The PSP is aimed at the same market that the iPod is.

The iPod is getting more and more capabilities that move it away from just a music player. The iPod Photo was the fist step, there is talk of a "vPod" video player in the near future.

Now surely the iPod line won't get games, but with music, photos and video the comparisons to PSP are stronger than the PSP to DS ones.

We, of course, see the games first since we are gamers and the PSP is a PlayStation Portable after all. However, Sony is a hardware and media company that has fingers in many pies. That some of that hardware and some of that media are to do with gaming is an aside to them.

The PSP is their first stab at the elusive "do everything" mobile device of Sci-Fi stories. Once they figure out how to put a phone in there without comparisons to the N-Gage flowing like water, they will have a good chance at establishing that market.

Think about it, Sony have the following under their umbrella; games, films, music, mobile phones, photo cameras, video cameras, televisions and audio devices. They are very well placed to put it all together into a single device.

Now I'm not saying this device is just around the corner, it's probably five to 10 years off at least, but the PSP is a toe in the water.

UMD movies are selling well in the US, two have topped 100,000 sales, for an installed base that would be lucky to have reached 1,000,000 (hardware sales topped 500,000 in April, but have slowed over summer) that's not bad. Two films have reached about 10% of the target audience. And that didn't include the Spider-Man 2 disk included in the box.

Anyway, back to my point, the PSP is not aimed at the same market as the DS, hence a direct comparison to the DS is not valid, it is an irrelevance to the marketing plan Sony has in place.

Whether you agree with that marketing plan is down to you to decide, but convergence is coming, you can't blame Sony for giving it a go.

I somwhat agree with you, but its kind of like comparing an Apple to a PC. Apples have a much better performance in terms of raw specs and are much more capable of handling graphic intensive programs. PCs are more open ended but aren't as up to snuff compared to Apples graphically. You could say that Apples are made for the Elite (graphic designers etc) while PCs are made for the general populace. Therefore you could say that PCs and Apples are not in direct competition, yet they still are.

Regardless, the point I'm trying to make is that although both handhelds are targeting different audiences, theres no chance that either company wouldnt want 100% of the market share, meaning that both companies would love to have audiences not targeted specifically for the handheld in question.

I see what you are trying to see here, but it's a bit flawed. Apple Macs and PCs use the same graphics chips/cards as each other. They use the same memory chips as each other and generally have the same graphical capabilities as each other.

MacOS has a better rendering subsystem for things like fonts and colour distribution. That's why designers favour Macs. Plus the entrenched "Macs are for design" attitude that permeates the industry.


I'd take exception to that assumption. There are a lot of design houses and the like that use PCs.

Macs are designed by Apple to do exactly the same things that PCs are designed to do, they have a history in design and graphics in general, but they are just as capable as PCs in other areas.


I think your basic analogy is flawed, as I've pointed out above, the closest I can come to the comparison I was outlining is with motor vehicles.

Consider a car and a truck. Both are motor vehicles, use the road system to get where they are going and share several physical attributes. However, a car is a personal transport system, it's limited to what it can carry and it's made to be comfortable. On the other hand a truck is designed to carry cargo, not people and can carry many different types of cargo. It's built to be functional, not comfortable.

While both Volvo and Ford make cars that compete against each other, Volvo wouldn't consider its trucks to be in competition with Ford's Fiestas.

Even that analogy is slightly flawed since the DS and PSP are closer to each other in basic functionality than a truck and a car. However it's the closest I can get to a non-games comparison that makes the point I was trying to get across.


Oh I agree with you 100% here. If you can get a device that overlaps several markets then you'd want that device to dominate all of them.

Sony want the PSP to compete with the iPod and portable DVD players. These other devices are cheaper than a PSP, but the convergence aspect will appeal to a lot of people.

Convergence is coming, Nokia has the largest share of the digital camera market and they don't sell digital cameras!