2005 UK Sales Review

Gamers whinged all-year-long at Sony's decision to delay the European launch until September 1st, but in reality the intense hype surrounding the machine built up a must-have aura around the system, and when it launched sales were way beyond everyone's expectations. In the first few days on sale the PSP smashed all previous hardware launch sales figures by a factor of two - and all this despite rampant import sales that Sony had been preoccupied with squashing all year long.

Needless to say, software sales were exceptional, despite serious doubts from the critics who complained bitterly about the load times and the lack of killer apps.

Although the Chart-Track figures are heavily skewed by the presence of mandatory software bundling from Sony, the tactic worked, with total unit sales of 2.63m, or 4.8 per cent of all games sold. By value the picture is even rosier for Sony, with sales totalling some £8.17m, representing 6.7 per cent of the total market value - instantly catapulting it ahead of the GBA market (£6.05m) and almost double that of the DS market (£4.14m). In context, this percentage puts it ahead of mainstream launches of home systems like the N64, Saturn, Dreamcast, GameCube and even the Xbox at a similar stage in its life cycle - both in terms of software unit sales and value and even hardware sales. Next to any other handheld launch, the figures are unprecedented whichever angle you look at them.

Game sales wise, you can probably guess that GTA: Liberty City Stories completely ran away with it. In just eight weeks, Rockstar clocked up over 360k, making it the best selling handheld title since Pokemon Yellow back in summer 2000. World Tour Soccer did incredibly well, too, with sales of not far short of 200k, but these figures are somewhat bogus because the game's sales were largely because of Sony's cunning bundle deal which obliged consumers to buy the game with the console for a while - during a period when demand was intense and supply very short.

Beyond that, football titles appear to be the hottest property among PSP owners long starved of decent handheld games in the genre. The arrival of Pro Evolution Soccer 5 in week 47 was very warmly received indeed, with sales of almost 150k - over 20k ahead of FIFA 06, which gives a fair indication of the continuing shift in the balance of power in the all-important football market.

EA's overall performance on the platform was excellent, though, with Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Burnout: Revenge both selling around 100k - two of the biggest sellers on the platform. In general, racing games proved to be a massive lure for the game buying public, with Midnight Club 3, WipEout Pure and Need For Speed Underground: Rivals selling over 50k, and TOCA Race Driver, Crash Tag Team Racing and even WRC not far off that figure - respectable quantities that would be considered successful on most other home systems.

In the 'EG favourites' category there were also some heart-warming successes. Top of the list was the surprise number ten success of the brilliant Lumines (over 70k), while other cracking titles like Ridge Racer (over 90k), Everybody's Golf and Virtua Tennis (both around 70k) also performed exceptionally well.

Even leftfield titles like Archer Maclean's Mercury (over 35k) did reasonably well, and - for once - we don't really have any major sob stories of brilliant underperforming titles. Maybe Frantix and Gripshift deserved to do better (less than 5k each), but they barely had any publicity and were released during the Christmas rush, so it's hardly a shock.

What is a surprise is just how many competing titles there were available in such a short space of time. To have 53 titles on the shelves from September 1st to mid December (13 each from Sony and EA alone) has to represent the biggest array of launch software on any platform, ever, and it's doubtful it will ever happen again. Of course, the massive delay ensured there would be a vast glut, and much of the quality was patchy at best, but Sony made the impact it wanted to.

The interesting thing will be to watch whether the platform's momentum stalls. Certainly, the quality of software has been a major talking point all year, and many question marks remain. Hopefully E3 will provide one or two pointers as to the direction of future PSP output.