PSP on verge of reaching 1 million sales in UK

As hard as it is to believe, the PSP may not be quite as bad as some of us make it out to be. Sure, there’s not many good games for the system. Granted, it uses the UMD, which is the grandchild of Betamax. And yes, you need a PlayStation 3 to (legally) play PSOne games on your PSP. But hey, people are still buying it! Here’s the proof:

Sony has announced that it’s confident it will clock up a million PSP UK sales by the end of the year.

Okay, it’s lagging a little behind what the DS has managed – Sony has downplayed the difference by claiming the two machines target dissimilar markets – but it does see PSP comfortably outperform both PS2 and Xbox 360 sales. A considerable achievement.

And crucially, it’s momentum that’s expected to carry on into the new year.

“The evolution you’ll see on PSP will be greater than any console Sony has ever released,” boasted a Sony spokesperson, “starting with new peripherals like the PSP camera, which is out in early 2007.”

Oh, yes, I want you so bad, PSP camera. Because cell phone cameras and digital cameras and pen cameras don’t already exist. And the PSP and DS “target dissimilar markets”? You can’t even argue that the DS and PSP target different age groups, because the DS pretty much targets people of all ages. The only other difference I can think of is that the DS targets gamers, and the PSP doesn’t. Am I missing something here, or does it look like Sony never intended for the PlayStation Portable to be a gaming device?

[Via Pocket Gamer]