Pocket Gamer has a story up about Sony’s recent financial reports and the news looks grim for their tiny, black portable. Here’s a quick quote to illustrate the mound of excrement piling up around the future of the PSP;
In the three months ending December 31st – the critical period that included the run up to Christmas – Sony shipped a mere 1.76 million PSPs worldwide, compared to 6.22 million in the same period in 2005. That’s a staggering fall of 72 per cent.
Total PSP hardware shipments in the three quarters so far recorded for this financial year total 7.67 million units. The company is now forecasting total PSP hardware shipments of 9 million for this financial year – a huge plunge from the 14.06 million it shipped in financial year ’05, and from its prediction last April of shipping 12 million units, too.
Of course, these are shipment numbers, as opposed to sales numbers, but since that includes systems still sitting on shelves, you can imagine that Sony’s boardroom is filled with fire and brimstone as of late.
Hit the jump for even more bad news.
“PSP sales declined due to a decrease in unit sales compared with the same quarter in the previous financial year,” is how the snappily titled Consolidated Financial Reports for the Third Quarter puts it.
The territory breakdown (an appropriate word here, sadly) makes particularly grim reading for PSP’s US fans.
PSP shipments for Q3 in Japan were 0.9 million (compared to 1.4 million in the same period in 2005), Europe took 0.9 million (compared to 3.2 million in 2005), but the real stinker was America.
Previously swallowing up almost 1.7 million PSPs in Q3 2005, the run up to Christmas 2006 saw Sony ship a mere 100,000 PSPs to the territory.
For those of you allergic to indented text, basically, Sony shipped less than a million units in both Europe and Japan and in the US they shipped only 100,000. By comparison, I found 100,000 Nintendo DS systems sitting in my closet earlier this morning.
Does this spell the end for Sony’s little guy? Not exactly, but when you consider the fact that the finest games for the system came out over the last couple months and it still only managed to sell as well as a leprosy covered T-shirt with dragons printed on it, things certainly don’t look so hot for Sony.
