It may never be considered the definitive PlayStation console, but a former PlayStation boss pays special respect to one variant and reveals its final secrets.
Its sales history began in Japan in 2004, and in Europe a year later, the PlayStation Portable, mostly just called the PSP. While it could never fully match its big sisters in the living room at home in terms of popularity, it has retained a loyal fan base to this day. One person who followed the time up close and personal is Shawn Layden – former PlayStation boss.
He has now (named some new facts about the life story of the portable console) and buried it on X, formerly Twitter, quasi for himself personally: In doing so, he singles out the PSP Go separately, as probably the most commercially unsuccessful variant of the family.
Released this day in 2009.
Like many things, it struggled to find an audience. Beloved nonetheless.
🙏🏾🎮💪🏾💙 pic.twitter.com/DNInqAaPYH– shawn layden 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🇺🇲 (@ShawnLayden) October 1, 2023
The new numbers give the PSP as a whole a time frame and we learn how many total units have been produced:
- Among all variants, 82,523,607 units were produced, or more than 82 million.
- Production ran from November 9, 2004 to September 26, 2014, so just over nine years ago their production ended at the plants.
Final data on sales figures we don’t have. Sony’s last publicly (mentioned sales figures for the PSP are from March 31, 2012). According to these, the Japanese hardware manufacturer was able to bring 76.4 million units among the gaming public
Discrepancy of six million: We don’t know what exactly happened to the few million PSPs that left Sony’s forge from the end of March 2012 until the late September days of 2014. But it seems rather unlikely that Sony disposed of them or still has them lying around in stockpiles somewhere.
It’s likely that the consoles were mostly discontinued, but just not reported on publicly anymore.
Do you still have a PSP in use yourself, or is your device – if you ever used one – collecting dust on the shelf by now? What is your favorite game? Would you like to see a new handheld from Sony or is the Japanese competition from the Switch or its probably not too distant successor simply too strong? Feel free to write us your thoughts in the comments!
