PSP Shipments Drop 75%

[wraggster]

via ign

Everyone and their DS-playing mom knew this already, but Sony has at last admitted to not making its worldwide shipment targets for the PlayStation 3 in 2006. As part of its third quarter financial report covering 10/2006 to 12/2006, the company announced today that worldwide shipments in 2006 for the new hardware capped off at 1.84 million units, short of the promised 2 million.

North America got most of those units, at 1.03 million. Japan got 810,000 units, with numbers climbing up past a million in the first few weeks of January.

The company is still aiming for 6 million units shipped by the end of March. By then, the PS3 will have launched in Europe.

Other Sony gaming hardware saw declines compared to the same period in the previous year. The PS2 shipped 4.11 million units, down by 23% from last year's 5.36 million units. The PSP shipped 1.76 million units, down by 72% from last year's 6.22 million units.

In software, PS3 saw shipments of 5.2 million units for the year. PSP saw an increase of 24% over the previous year, hitting 21.2 million game titles. PS2 dropped 16% from the previous year, with 78 million games shipped.

All the lowered shipments along with the PS3 launch caused some dark figures for Sony's games division. While sales for the quarter rose 5.6% from the same period last year to 442.8 trillion yen, operating profits dropped sharply from a gain of 67.8 trillion yen last year to a loss of 122.0 trillion yen this year.

The company expects to stop taking losses on PS3 hardware in the next term, Sony CFO (chief financial officer) Nobuyuki Oneda announced at the financial briefing. One means of doing this will be through smaller chip sizes. The company has already started manufacturing CELL chips using a 65 nanometer process, Japan's IT Media reports.

Even with a turn in fortunes on Sony's hardware losses, don't expect a price drop any time soon. Oneda said that Sony is not consdering a price drop right now, although something could be possible in 2 or 3 years.

In response to that massive drop in PSP shipments for the quarter, Oneda said that Sony will not be giving on the platform, repeating past promises that a number of ideas are under consideration.

[Sterist]

im no expert but 72% rounds down to 70%

[Broadus]

Maybe people will want to buy more brand-new PSPs now that all PSPs, even TA-082s can be downgraded? You still need an old version of Grand Theft Auto, currently, which would slow things down in that department. In my case, I have a friend who will just let me borrow his (I'm the one who sold it to him in the first place). Now I can sell my broken PSP and buy another for cheap instead of spending $100 on a new motherboard.

[darthclone]

yo does the smaller chip sizes mean the xbox360 wins as a better consol

[the_eternal_dark]

yo does the smaller chip sizes mean the xbox360 wins as a better consol

No, it just means the chip runs cooler and use less power under full load. Xbox360 is supposedly about to do the same (if they haven't already done so).

[The_Ultimate_Eggman]

MMMMmm I can hear the death bell tolling..

[PSPCulture]

MMMMmm I can hear the death bell tolling..

Not yet, not yet......

Couple of things to take into account - units shipped does not equal units sold. Sony may have ramped back the shipments of the PSP to focus on the PS3. If there was enough stock globally for the demand expected, there would be no need to ship a high volume in the last quarter of the year.

Secondly, Sony have still managed to sell millions of PSP's globally, so its not about to be killed off - don't forget that those PSP's that are homebrew enabled is a small percentage of those being used.

Remember that the both the PSone and PS2 both got hacked and modded early in their lives, but still sold in reasonable numbers (and still do), and it was only recently that the PSone stopped production.

The only real danger to the PSP is the continual hacking of the PSP firmware, that means game developers are less likely to want to develop for the system - I know homebrew <> piracy, but its still rife in the PSP community.