PSP Hits 50 Million Sales Milestone

Kris Erickson • Feb 13, 2009 • Comments ()

If there were any doubts still lingering about the PSP being a success in the hardware market, today’s announcement from Sony should quash them. The company announced that the PSP handheld has achieved 50 million units in worldwide sales since its launch in 2004. In raw figures, this means that the PSP has outsold the Nintendo 64 (33 million), the Xbox 360 (29 million) and the PS3 (27 million).

The company added that it has sold approximately 200 million games for the system since its launch, and that the PSP library now boasts over 2000 titles. These figures include re-issued downloads of PSOne titles as well as UMDs. Many of these purchases have been made over the new PSP Store, introduced in 2008. These figures would give the PSP a respectable worldwide software attach rate of 4:1. This level of software attachment is good, but not great. By contrast, the NPD group estimates the Xbox 360 has an attach rate of 7.5:1, while the Wii is at 5.3:1.

Now that Sony has proven itself capable of creating a top-selling handheld game system, it needs to put some effort into motivating software developers to create popular titles for the system. On the other hand, these sales suggest that software companies should be flocking to the PSP already. What is holding them back?