Is the Sony PSP about to be discontinued? According to Select-Copy-Paste, the PSP will be as good as dead by the end of next year.

This is based on the poor selling performance of both the PSP hardware and software since it has been launched, and the fact that the UMD format is going the same way as the Betamax video cassette.

Although it should be noted that the PSP has not been a total failure, there are close to 200 games available for the platform, and new games are announced for it from time to time, the most Notable releases for this Year Infact are the New Silent Hill Origins and Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, but as far are sales it’s losing leaps and bounds to the Nintendo DS, and this is not just speculation.

I wouldn’t even begin to suggest the PSP is a failure, it has solld over 20,000,000 units worldwide, and continues to sell reasonably well. Constant comparisons to the Nintendo DS are misleading in a lot of respects, as the two devices are only similar in so far as they both play games. If both the PSP and the Nintendo DS only played games, comapring the two would be fine, and it would be a price and game debate. However, the PSP also allows you to watch films (both in UMD format and from the Memory Stick Pro Duo), plays music, has a web browser, LocationFree player, RSS Feeds, Camera, GPS etc etc.

the PSP is at a plateau, the high priority releases right at the very end of it’s life will not be enough to save it, and I honestly believe that we will see it peter out in a little over a year. Unfortunately there is not a whole lot that Sony can do to truly help the PSP without taking a tremendous loss (or more than they are taking at the moment), a price drop would further cripple any chance at the system being profitable and would likely be seen by developers as an act of desperation, and with sales slowing it is unlikely that Sony will be able to attract additional third part developers

I assume ‘high priority releases’ means highly hyped games. This doesn’t take into account games such as Monster Hunter Freedom, LocoRoco, Metal Gear Solid : Portable Ops etc that are doing very well on the PSP, in fact there are reports of shortages of Metal Gear Solid : Portable Ops in Japan, and the next Monster Hunter Freedom game already having 500,000 pre-release orders placed.

The PSP will not ‘peter out’, for one thing, Sony will not let part of the playstation franchise be seen as anything other than a success, any thoughts on it being a failure will harm the brand and therefore sales of other devices in the Playstation range. Secondly, the PSP is selling in reasonable numbers, 20+ millions units is a solid base to wrk from, and there are a number of PSP games coming out that are sure to help sell more units.

Of course, everything comes to an end, and one day the PSP will stop being produced, but I predict thats more likely to be around 2009 when the next generation PSP (PSP2 if you like) will be introduced.