Portable Gaming Revolution

It’s kind of a good news/bad news kind of thing for Sony. First… the bad news: the sales figures for the PSP handheld system on it’s own were down 72% this holiday season (October to December) when compared to the same time period in 2005. That’s a massive drop from selling 6.22 million units to a paltry 1.76 million.

Now for the good news: even if the system itself isn’t selling as well as Sony would like, people are still buying games like mad! Their software numbers were up 24% during the holiday season over the previous year.

In response to that massive drop in PSP shipments for the quarter, Nobuyuki Oneda (Sony’s chief financial officer) said that Sony will not be giving on the platform, repeating past promises that a number of ideas are under consideration.

One of the ways that Sony has decided to try and get some momentum back for the PSP is to seriously push forward the multi-media capabilities of the system. They are looking at implementing all sorts of online goodies (think along the lines of downloadable content such as PSOne and PS2 games, movies and television shows) sometime in March, and are expected to go ahead with a massive partnership with a large ISP provider, such as Yahoo, to provide the service.

It was pretty much a competition issue with the Nintendo so we have to fight back by introducing more attractive applications [for the PSP] by using the network,” Oneda told the Financial Times.

I’m definitely pulling for Sony here, especially considering their financial outlook for this year: they are currently forecasting PSP hardware sales to be in the 9 million range, which is a considerable drop from the 14.06 million that were shipped in 2005.

I guess the biggest question here would be… are these new online services going to come at a cost or will they be provided for free??