GDJustin said:The PSPs performance isn't that poor. It just seems poor in the face of the DS's AMAZING japanese performance. Its not that the PSP is doing that BADLY, its just that the DS is exceeding people's sales expectations so much that it makes it seem bad.
No offence GDJustin, but the PSP's performance has indeed been very poor. The hardware numbers have been decent, but it is regularly being outsold by both the PS2 and DS, and the GBA has even been keeping pretty close to it the past few months. The GBM will knock it down to 4th in the weekly hardware charts.
But the real 'poor' performance is in the software. The DS software has been outselling the PSP software about 10:1 over the past couple of months, and there have been weeks this summer where the PSP software total was basically the same as the hardware total (about 20,000 units). That is just pathetic. And keep in mind, Sony set up the PSP to make its money in software sales - they probably lose money on each piece of hardware sold. So moving 20,000 units of hardware and basically no software every week is a horrible situation for Sony right now in Japan. I'm not sure how Japan works with UMD licensing, but IIRC, Sony doesn't make a penny on any of the UMD movies in the U.S. - except in-house pictures of course.
PSP fans can hang their hat on the HW & SW success in the U.S. right now, with Europe about to launch. But it has been pretty much a disaster in Japan the past 5 or 6 months.