TOKYO —

Sony says global sales of its PlayStation handheld game console have topped 50 million units.
 
The PlayStation Portable, known as PSP, debuted in Japan in December 2004. It hit markets in the U.S., Asia and Europe in 2005.
 
The company’s video game unit, Sony Computer Entertainment, announced the sales in a statement Friday.
 
Brisk sales of the PSP are raising a challenge to rival Nintendo’s DS portable console—the market leader. In Japan, PSP sales outpaced the DS for several months last year, according to Tokyo-based trade magazine Enterbrain.
 
Nintendo said the Kyoto-based company has sold 96.2 million DS and its latest version DSi consoles since December, 2004.

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5 Comments

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  kenchan at 09:21 AM JST - 14th February

  ...hardware numbers tell only 10% of the story on their relative positions....lets forget that the PSP has 50% less install base and concentrate on software sales per hardware sold (tie in ratio)...as of dec 08 the rate for the DS was 4.8 and 4.2 for PSP....this might not seem such a big difference but this shows that the DS has sold 30,000,000 more software than the PSP over their entire lifecycles to date (true the PSP came 4 months later). Overall, the DS not only has higher hardware sales but higher software sales....therefore this whole article about the PSP challenging the DS is utter crap.

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  proxy at 01:15 PM JST - 14th February

  If only Sony would issue a fully hackable version, I would buy a PSP tomorrow.

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  kenchan at 09:34 PM JST - 14th February

  yes and sony makes loads of money from game hardware....NOT

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  cwhite at 04:34 PM JST - 15th February

  how about the price difference or more so the margin of profit for both hardware and software? and if you want to be really picky the cost of developing games whether it be a new or down converted game. Next we can think about cross language costs and games that sell well outside of Japan.

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  kenchan at 09:58 PM JST - 16th February

  no because those costs are relatively even between platforms and is the developers costs...nothing to do with the sales of software/hardware....there are 2 figures that the industry abides by..hardware and software and the interlink between them...I just wanted to point out that this article missed this point.

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