Sony Claims Second Place For PSP In UK

Sony representatives have claimed that the PSP has been the second best selling console of the year in the UK, behind the Nintendo DS but ahead of both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360. Speaking to UK trade paper MCV, Sony UK commercial director Kevin Jowett said, “People mention us in the same breath as DS because we’re both handheld products, but we’re actually going after very different markets. We’ve put in just under £300 million ($588m) of turnover at retail with PSP because we’re such a boys console and we’ve hit the mark with older gamers.” Sony’s claims are apparently based on official Chart-Track statistics, not the company’s usual shipped figures, although the PSP’s strong performance is likely to have been weighted heavily to the beginning of the year, before the release of the Nintendo DS Lite. In November, Nintendo claimed that the DS was outselling the PSP by a ratio of 2.5:1, with two million units sold in the UK in total. Sony UK claim they are confident of selling one million units of the PSP in the UK before the end of the year, suggesting that the console, which only launched in September 2005 in Europe, has an installed userbase of less than half that of the Nintendo DS. Nevertheless, Jowett was confident of the format’s continued success, stating: “The evolution you’ll see on PSP will be greater than any console Sony has ever released, starting with new peripherals like the PSP camera, which is out in early 2007.”