sonycowboy said:
Those sales were NOT in the first year of availability when there were expected shortages for at least the next several months through their respective launches. Theres no way in the world they can even produce 20M units with current capacity split between the PS2 & PSP.
I think 10M is a good number through the end of the year and I do expect the DS to be absolutely killed on a monthly basis once both systems get going. The DS, IMO, has no real future. As I've said before, it's merely a stopgap system to blunt PSP penetration before the GBANext gets released.
How can they not make 15-20M units? They are bumping to 2M a month in the Summer, right? Even assuming it happens in early-Fall instead (September), that's still gonna be 14M PSPs made from September to the following march, plus the 5M they'll be making from April this year to August. That's 19M units. Am I making this stuff up? The sheer math of their production schedule makes it almost impossible for them to make less than 15M. At the very least, they'll make 12M PSPs this year, b/c they'll be making 1M per month in April.
Understand, when I say 15-20M units, I'm underestimating. The PS1 and PS2 didn't sell that many in year 1, but that's irrelevant. The PS1 was a new system in the market and was establishing the brand. The PS2 simply had production problems. They could have sold 20M in year 1 easy. The PSP has neither of these problems. The Playstation brand is the strongest in gaming. There are no production problems. On the contrary, and as I predicted no less, the PSP will see the largest year 1 production of all their systems to date. I believe the PS2 was still only being produced in lots of 1-1.5M units though until early 2001, which is why the final shipping total topped out at just over 10M. I'm shorting Sony's PSP numbers, b/c if Kutaragi wasn't bullshitting us, the actual math is gonna look like this:
3M units @ 1M per month from Apr-Jun
+ 10M units @ 2M per month from Jul-Nov
+ 12M units @ 3M per month from Dec-Mar
-------
25M units shipped in year 1 based on the the production schedule mentioned by KK last week.
I'm cutting it short at 15-20M, assuming they hit production problems. This is regardless of demand, I'm not looking at that since it's not something that can be gauged. But Sony is planning to unleash the floodgates, and I don't think some quite appreciate the absolutely clobbering they are going to dole out. Their fiscal year conference is gonna blow some people's doors off. They are not playing games. They are going to take the handheld market completely, or crash and burn in spectacular fashion. As I said, even missing their totals by 3M units or so comes out to $500M in lost revenue. That's already a big loss in any fiscal report, and that's assuming a low price of $150. Imagine the damage if it's really a $180-200 part. They're gonna move these units any way they can.
It all goes back to what I've been saying about Sony needing to establish the PSP as a profitable device by the end of the fiscal year. I thought this from when they first announced it a couple years back. It's positioning in their production schedule seems like it was always intended to eliminate the transitional slump. The first year of their consoles have always had losses. I think both the PS1 and PS2 saw three losing quarters to one profitable one. The PSP, IMO, is intended to "bridge the gap". If they have a 15-20M PSP userbase, that's a very healthy userbase that can produce massive amounts of revenue. You can sell 4-6M GTAs or GT4s on a platform with that kind of userbase. Likewise, economies of scale make hardware losses marginal to none, so now you have a hot, growing product in the PSP that can generate profit. The PSTwo will be waning, but even its declining profits will only be black, not red on the account book, so they'll have that in addition to the PSP to help offset what will probably be large losses on the PS3. And I think we can continue to expect them to stagger the two systems in a similar fashion.
Who knows, maybe I'm totally off base. But the production schedule is the first hint we have at what they expect to do with the PSP this year. If it holds up, you're looking at 15M units easy...that'll be if they fall short on production. Optimimum is 25M. I expect it to be somewhere in-between (20M?), but 15M is a nice, conservative guess at this point. I don't think it matters what the GBA and other handhelds have sold before. I think this has to be a success, and a resounding success no less, otherwise Sony will be in dire straight financially. Failure is not an option. The PSP's failure could cause a cascade of problems for the PS3. I don't think it's appreciated how much Sony wants and needs this. PEACE.
and also PSP is better in almost every other category.
