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Sony Media Movies Portables (Games)

UMD Sales Picking Up Steam 78

Posted by Zonk from the chug-chug-chug dept.
After what some deemed a slow start, Sony is now claiming that they've sold slightly more than 17 Million UMDs since the launch of the PSP. 9 Million of these discs have been games, with just over 8 Million UMD movies. From the article: "Current manufacturing lines are stretched to the max - Bob Hurley, with Sony DADC, says that Sony is churning out 200,000 UMDs a day and future capacity is expected to be 500,000 per day. 'Tiger Woods Golf is my personal favorite [game], but video has been surprisingly good to us,' says Hurley. In a few years Sony expect videos to be more than 60 percent of all UMD sales, with an expected 130 million UMDs being sold in 2008."
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UMD Sales Picking Up Steam More

UMD Sales Picking Up Steam

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  • huh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01, 2005 @02:26PM (#13457228)
    You'd really think Valve would have an annoucement about this on their site somewhere...

  • Sales by territory? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by metallicagoaltender ( 187235 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @02:28PM (#13457244) Homepage
    I'd be curious to see the sales numbers broken out by territory, especially the movies. Are UMD movies selling well in America, or has Japan been helping those numbers?
     
    Considering no one I know has been the least bit interested in movies, despite enjoying the PSP, I'm honestly surprised with those figures...
    • Little anti-PSP comment here, but bare with me -

      The reason so many vids have sold is that people who shelled out $$ need something to justify all that $$ they shelled out for something that has only retread games - so they buy a video.

      And yeah, I know what I have in my sig, but I already got the Xbox and Ipod free, so why not.

  • I guess there's simply no limit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BlackCobra43 ( 596714 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @02:29PM (#13457246)
    to human stupidity.

    movies I can't play anywhere other than on my tiny PSP screen, for more than a DVD? SIGN ME UP!

    Seriously, I doubt UMDs will account for 60%, as the novelty of this format will soon wear off. (one can hope, anyway...)

  • no surprize (Score:5, Funny)

    by Turn-X Alphonse ( 789240 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @02:32PM (#13457278) Journal
    UMDs seem to majorly outnumber games. You can't buy what isn't there.
  • In a few years Sony expect videos to be more than 60 percent of all UMD sales, with an expected 130 million UMDs being sold in 2008.
    They're tring to tell us how many UMDs will be sold three years from now?!? What about some predictions about 2006 and 2007? This smells like some pretty rank PR to me.
  • The PSP had it's EU launch today. I work in central London and took a walk around at lunch-time today, popping into a good few shops selling it to see what take-up was like (not to buy one myself - I got a US import back in May).

    Simply put, it looks phenomenal. I know the initial sales in the US weren't quite what were expected, but at 1PM today, I couldn't find a single shop in the Victoria-area that still had stock to sell. I went into Dixons, HMV, Game and Virgin and all of them had sold out. I heard the
    • The UK has more bus & train commuters, so I'd imagine it would be a better PSP market.

      • Re:Slightly off-topic, but still relevant (Score:4, Insightful)

        by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) * on Thursday September 01, 2005 @02:59PM (#13457558) Journal
        This is very true. I've got a fairly substantial train commute myself. I've always seen a lot of Gameboys and GBAs (particularly the SP) on the train. However, a fortnight after the DS launch, all the DSes had vanished and the GBAs had come back. Having tried using my own DS on the train, I can see why; the stylus is an absolute pain in the arse to use in an environment that's rattling and shaking a lot. With the video-from-memory-stick capabilities, I'd expect to see the PSP being a huge hit with the (fairly affluent) commuter crowd. I've been using mine to watch movies, TV shows etc on the train for months now, with a lot of jealous glares.
      • Personally, theres nothing I like more than watching a loading screen inbetween 15 second bouts of play on my handheld device, while I try and calculate how much more battery life I have left. Commuters will swarm to it, just like they did in Japan, which also has a heck of alot of public transportation.
        • FUD...

          Seriously, why does slashdot tolerate so much FUD regarding the PSP? Is it seriously so threatening to have a decent competitor to Nintendo on the handheld market?

          My daily round-trip commute, until fairly recently, was just over 3 hours. When the trains were broken, which in this country is a pretty regular occurence, I could spend up to 5, even 6 hours a day on the train. Not once, in all this time, did I get so much as a low battery warning from my PSP, whether I'd been watching stuff from the memor

        • Commuters will swarm to it, just like they did in Japan, which also has a heck of alot of public transportation.

          Well, here in Japan on my regular 1 hour commute on three different trains, I see almost no PSPs, or even DSs or GBs for that matter. I've seen one person watching video on it, and one using it as a music player, and just a handful of players. I see much, much more people (at least one per day) playing games on their mobiles. Of course, all this gaming is insignificant compared to the emailers,

    • Re:Slightly off-topic, but still relevant (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Thursday September 01, 2005 @02:49PM (#13457438)
      I wonder if Sony figured out how bad it looked to have 150 unsold PSPs in the case at every walmart the day after release and only shipped enough to cause an artificial shortage...

      I wouldn't put it past them.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I live in Europe and passed by the main retailer in my area today and saw an intersting thing.

        Where up until yesterday there was a shelf full of plastic boxes representing preorder-PSPs, there were a line of GranTourismo-PStwo bundles, and above literally hundreds of UMDs.

        The only systems I saw were 4 boxes lodged between the PS2s and another huge pile of UMDs.

        I'll check out the situation again maybe tomorrow, but if Sony give main retailers, like maybe ten PSPs it's no wonder they're sold out.
        • From what I've seen, most "major" shops had about 30 PSPs... a lot of them had boards outside showing how many were left, with the numbers being crossed out as they sold. Smaller branches seem to have had about half this number.

          Interestingly, the Game in Victoria station has now ceased selling Gamecube titles (except for a few in the second-hand trays) as they needed the shelf-space for PSP titles. Will be interesting to see if that policy is here to stay and if it's extended to bigger branches (the outlet
    • I find it interesting that you made a relevant, yet arguably pro-Sony comment, and you got modded down. At the same time I made a relevant, yet arguably anti-Sony comment in response and got modded up to 5.

      I hope the fucking asshole nintendo fanboy that modded you down and me up comes back here and reads this to learn that the guy he modded up is a PSP owner and thinks the DS sucks, even though I made a negative comment about Sony. (Yes, I can admit to plusses and minuses in a device I paid a lot of money f
  • Gotta give to the American gaming public, they love slick marketing so much they went out and bought something they probably already had in their collections and then bought some $30 UMD movies to go on top of it. I'll just continue to watch my $17 DVDs on my wireless laptop and listen to my iPod and save myself the $250 until Sony stops porting year-old PS2 games to the PSP. I recently saw an article lambasting the gaming industry for lack of innovation... but I'm starting to think the blame for all this
  • ...these Umbrellas of Mass Destruction. They serve no additional purpose in a civilized society living under the constant shadow of nuclear annihilation.
  • "9 Million of these discs have been games, with just over 8 Million UMD movies"

    How many of those were the bundled Spiderman 2?

    Now do those figures mean consumers ahve purchased 9 million or that retailers have purchased 9 million and they are just sitting on their shelves? Sales figures like that have always confused me as it is hard to see how they could quickly & easily track actual consumer sales.
    • Sales figures like that have always confused me as it is hard to see how they could quickly & easily track actual consumer sales.

      I think all major retail stores have fairly tight integration between their customer sales and suppliers for next-day shipping services.

      Barcode is scanned on the way out and an order will be placed a few hours later if the computer determines the number of items on the shelf is low.

      Incidentally, this makes shoplifting fun. If the computer doesn't know the item is missing from
    • How many of those were the bundled Spiderman 2?

      ...Uh, exactly 1 million.

  • The real question is.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ZosX ( 517789 ) <zosxavius.gmail@com> on Thursday September 01, 2005 @02:59PM (#13457553) Homepage
    Are these actual retail sales or simply product that Sony has sold to retailers. The number seems awfully high and it makes me wonder what percentage of the UMDs are sitting on store shelves right now versus how many have actually sold.

    The whole things smells of how to lie with statistics.

  • Why buy them (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PktLoss ( 647983 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @03:10PM (#13457684) Homepage Journal
    I own a PSP, and have since around their NA launch, I've never even considered buying a UMD movie. Why pay the same price as a DVD (that plays on my PC, Laptop & Television, and can be encoded to fit on my memory stick for the PSP) for a lower quality disc I can only use on one device?.

    Now, if they sold DVD & UMD combo packs for like $3-$5CDN above the DVD only price, they might hook me in. But even then, the prices on portable DVD players are comming down so fast why bother? I've already got 100+ DVDs, buying one of those (while adding bulk to my tech bag) would make more sense.
  • Hell, if I had been fool enough to dish out $300 on a PSP I'd be happy about such stupid little things like a barely usable web browser and the ability to pay twice for movies and then get a limited format that is sub-par to almost everything out there... Yay!

    With the horrible shortage of anything decent to play on the PSP except decade old roms, UMD's are about the only way to feel like you got any value from your purchase and even then it is pretty damn questionable.

  • Double cross (Score:3, Informative)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @03:24PM (#13457846) Homepage Journal
    SONY comes out and markets the PSP as to compete with the DS. The DS basically won with Nintendogs and Advance Wars. With Mario Kart on the horizon hope is lost.

    But wait, what's this? By selling UMDs they switched markets! PSP vs. video iPod, stay tuned.
    • The only exception I see is that a video iPod would (most likely) have an integrated AV port, such as that which was in certain iBook models.

      Hell, they already sell a cable for it [apple.com]. It would allow you to connect to any external video/audio source to play the content. Not to mention that, if you purchased video clips or movies through the iTunes store, you would most likely be able to play the content on the computer as well (iTunes already has video playing capabilities).

      I think that if Apple does a video iP

    • Re:Double cross (Score:3, Interesting)

      by oGMo ( 379 )

      SONY comes out and markets the PSP as to compete with the DS.

      Not really. It's more like Sony announced a next-gen handheld, and Nintendo tried to counter with the DS. Sony specifically doesn't consider the DS a competitor: nor should they. The GBA, perhaps, but more as a "reigning handheld champion vs the next generation" rather than on features.

      The DS basically won with Nintendogs and Advance Wars.

      This is laughable, and insulting to Nintendo. They will forever dominate this generation bas

      • Re:Double cross (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bleaknik ( 780571 )
        There a few things I'd like to point out.

        First, Nintendogs and Advance Wars are great games. Do not discard them because they aren't targetted to you. I don't understand it, but my niece and all of her friends want Nintendogs this year. And Advance Wars... My cousin has loved the series since inception. Just because the game isn't oGMo friendly, doesn't mean they're lousy games. People buy them because they want them.

        Comparing Twisted Metal and Wipeout to Mario Kart isn't even fair. I love all three,

        • Do not discard them because they aren't targetted to you. I don't understand it, but my niece and all of her friends want Nintendogs this year. And Advance Wars... My cousin has loved the series since inception.

          I am not; but they are not big system sellers; certainly they are not opponent killers. I know a kid who regularly plays my GBA for hours on end, and has done so for a number of years, but has only ever played Advance Wars.

          Just because the game isn't oGMo friendly, doesn't mean they're lou

          • Nintendo has a single thing they need to overcome right now: Nintendo. They're not in a condition to compete with anyone until they decide to get it in gear and start doing what they're actually good at: making games.

            Nintendo makes plenty of games for their systems. The problem is that nobody else does.

        • However, the problem with your analysis is this: the PSP is not in direct competition with the Nintendo DS. The PSP is selling the "adult" games... the Twisted Metals, the Wipeouts, and the (coming soon) GTAs. The DS, however is focusing on something entirely different; it is trying to attract a new crowd of gamers... types like the girlfriends, the less "hardcore" gamers, or the extremely casual gamer.

          I agreed with a lot of what you said, but that statement there just cost you a lot of credibility wit

          • I consider myself a relatively "hardcore" gamer, yet I still prefer the DS to the PSP. The DS has some amazing games that seem to cater to me, as well as the ones designed to attract new crowds.

            Nintendogs, though, sparks little interest on my part, and I doubt other people in my demographic will be too interested either.

            For the record, I fit the stereotypical /. bill... age 18-35 male with a relatively large tech budget and the "knack".
            • I fit the demographic as well. I had little to no interest in Nintendogs, and was all stoked for Advance Wars. Yet somehow... after playing my girlfriend's copy, I went out and bought my own copy. As I was playing her game, I realized that I could make the dog do anything I bloody well wanted. That really appealed to me.

              I now have a pinscher that answers to the name "Pothead", and performs suitable actions upon hearing the commands "pass the bong", "chug chug chug, or (my favorite) "want some dope?".
      • This is laughable, and insulting to Nintendo. They will forever dominate this generation based on an advanced tamagotchi and a strategy game that just came out? I should hope they have something better in their lineup. People buy these games for one reason: it's the only thing they can get.

        5 weeks in a row:

        Trace Memory
        Lost in Blue
        Castlevania
        Trauma Center
        Phoenix Wright

        Where on earth are you getting your information? DS also has Sonic Rush, Viewtiful Joe, Animal Crossing (online), Mario Kart (on
  • I'm fairly certain there are currently more compelling UMD movies available for the PSP than there are games. Now we hear that the sales are nearly split. I find it humorous that the PSP is not being used in it's primary function. Does that make it a failure?

  • UMDs stink, people buy them. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Thursday September 01, 2005 @04:05PM (#13458341) Homepage
    I've been thinking about this. The idea of buying UMD movies seems stupid to me as it does to nearly every slashdotter. So why do people buy them? I think we are all missing one key point.

    Who are we? I'm 22, most of us are adults. We often have laptops, or portable DVD players to watch movies on. We buy our own things.

    Who is buying the PSP movies? I think the answer is obvious: not us. So who is doing it? Moms! There are lots of kids out there with PSPs (despite Sony targeting it as the Adult handheld). Buying UMD movies makes some sense. You can get something that you kid will watch in the car on the way to/from school, sitting at the doctor's office, etc. It runs on something they already have so you don't have to buy (and they don't have to carry around) a portable DVD player. Most cars don't have DVD players. And most kids don't have laptops to play DVDs on. For a kid, it does make some sense.

    I think this is where all the movie sales are going. I don't think I've ever seen an adult interested in them, but I've seen many kids at stores looking at those movies. I can see why they'd want it (I would have when I was 10 if I liked more movies they sold).

    I'd like to see the sales broken down by age range of the person the movie was bought for. THAT would be the interesting information (although sales by territory as another commenter suggested would be interesting too).

  • Doesn't anyone else see a broken business model here?

    When almost 50% of software sales for a GAME system are MOVIES, isn't something wrong?

    People always talk about the Nintendo DS as a gimmick handheld. But I'm starting to think the PSP is actually the gimmick here. Be honest, would you even think about buying a $250 PSP if all it did was play movies that cost just as much or sometimes more than DVDs on a screen the fraction of the size of a TV? Basically, the idea that it's actually a "gaming" device i

  • Jeez (Score:1)

    by Luveno ( 575425 )
    I can't believe the unquestioned love that Nintendo (and Apple) get here on /.

    Having bought both a DS and a PSP on their respective launch dates (making me a "fanboy" of both), as well as being a mass-transit commuter, I will say that the PSP gets considerably more time than the DS.

    Quite frankly, the DS launch library sucked. There was Mario 64 and that was about it. Maybe Feel The Magic. Now, with Meteos out as well as Advance Wars, the library has picked up. But until very recently, it started to

    • See, that's perfectly fine for you, and you should be pretty happy now with a totally tricked-out PSP and with the awesome library of games the DS is finally getting, that's great. But you also have to understand that 90% of people don't have that kind of money to spend. You probably spent AT LEAST $350 on the whole PSP thing. That, on top of a DS, plus games and all, comes out to over $600. A lot of people just can't spend that kind of money on games, and you have to be aware of that. For me, I've totall

    • That said, once you find a non-defective unit and you drop enough cash into it, the PSP does really outshine the DS.

      You just underline the problem I have with the PSP. I bought a DS for 200 CND$, with a game and all taxes include. All games cost about 10$ less and the battery last a good 10-12 hours. I can close the lid in a hurry, the game will pause itself and the unit will fall into a low power mode, while protecting my screens at the same time. That's what I call a HANDHELD device.

      The PSP, whil
      • I didn't really make any bones about it - it is more expensive. But in the end, for me it is a superior device.

        If bang-for-buck was the aim, then I would recommend the GBA-SP. That thing simply rocks (mine's been relagated to my 6-year-old).

  • UMD will fail just like MD (MiniDisc)... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...unless Sony releases UMD burner/rom-drives that supports any data for computers. It's clear that Sony is making the same misstake again. Why not let other manufactures make/sell UMD-ROM drives and UMD-Burners by letting them pay a royalty to Sony?, I'd buy a drive or two =P

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