The discussion then moved onto the portable space. Interestingly, the PSP has actually had a higher adoption rate than the PS1. Looking at the 18 months after launch of each system, the PSP sold 5.30 million units in America compared to the PS1's 3.48 million, according to SCEA internal sell-through data. Furthermore, while the DS has been an unbelievable success in Japan, in North America since the PSP launched it's outsold the DS, roughly 5 million units to 4.1 million units. Life-to-date, however, the DS still has a larger installed base in North America (5.6 million vs. 4.9 million).
Said Tretton, "We really feel we carved out new territory [with the PS1] and then we built upon that with the PS2. The parallel that we draw to the PSP is that it is exactly the same to portable gaming to what the PlayStation was to console gaming, that we are carving this new road out and we are selling again to 20-something consumers that were not fans of portable entertainment, were not playing Game Boys because the technology and the software offerings just weren't appealing to them... And now because of the technology in PSP and the game offerings it appeals to them and that same consumer we carved out with the PlayStation is now being carved out with the PSP at an even much greater rate than we did with the original PlayStation. There's a lot of PlayStation legacy there that we've been able to capitalize on that we didn't have back in 1995, but I think it's very similar in terms of carving out a new audience and that new audience has generated $2 billion in revenue in the 17 months that the PSP has been out."
He continued, "I think obviously our competition, the handheld devices from Nintendo and specifically in the case of the DS, we really feel like they're appealing to the same audience that Game Boy has always appealed to. And if you look at the adoption rate of the DS over the first 17 months, not only does it trail the PSP but it also trails their other platforms... They're potentially losing some of their core audience and they're not really expanding beyond that and we think we're expanding into a completely new audience as we did with PlayStation. And we'll do just what we did on PlayStation; we'll dip down to the younger consumer eventually and we'll ultimately appeal to that vastly Earth wide audience we carved out with the original PlayStation."
"Earth-wide audience"
Reminiscent of Sega's "6 billion players" perhaps. I dunno though, PSP has done well in the USA, admittedly selling more than DS since it's been released (unless Sony are just quoting the old shipped, not sold figures - probable!) - but at the moment the DS Lite is selling faster again.
Either way, comments like that are just pissing against the tide.
