There's been plenty of words exchanged about the console wars, but one conflict has been sort of ignored in that shuffle: the portable situation.

I was reading this news story the other day and was struck by two things. One, the analysts still seem convinced that Sony will prevail in the current-generation struggle. I'll avoid that argument, at least for now, beyond noting that analysts have been incorrectly predicting dismal financial years for the industry for seemingly forever, so these reports mean only as much as consumers let them mean, which I'm betting is close to nothing. What struck me more was the quote "The handheld market is no longer a one-horse race." But I really wonder how much good the PSP has done Sony overall.

There's no question that the DS has turned out to be one gamble that paid off fantastically for Nintendo, which is part of the reason many people (myself included) are excited for the prospects of the Wii. The 'mutant handheld that could' sold nearly 27 million systems worldwide as of the end of September, and if early reports are to be believed, the DS had an even more successful holiday season than the consoles. Sony, however, has dodged neatly around naming how many PSPs have sold, giving only units shipped as a figure. As of September, 23 million PSPs were shipped, which is still a fair margin lower than the DS had sold by that point. If one wanted to take a pessimistic viewpoint, as I will do for argument's sake, Sony avoided saying the number sold because their sales figures were even lower than their shipped figures.

One thing that has always confused me about the PSP is the way Sony has mareketed it. For some reason, they're convinced they want the 'street' demographic, and they want it bad. From the squirrel ads to the graffiti art to the newest YouTube viral marketing, Sony seems convinced that convincing consumers that the PSP is what the cool kids are playing is the way to go. However, the last scheme in particular reeks of desperation. From the embarassingly bad attempts at slang on the website to the videos themselves, which practically ticked off the bullet points from the back of the box, the campaign was horribly conceived from square one. I actually looked up the videos after the news about the ads broke, and... well, they could have put a guy up to the camera and had him beg the viewer to buy the PSP and the message would have been more or less the same.

The funny thing is, the DS seems to be far less advertised than the PSP. I mean, I saw a few ads for the DS Lite leading up to its release, and a few ads for Elite Beat Agents after it came out, but really the DS seems to practically sell itself now. Not to mention the PSP is still lagging behind the DS in sales even after shaving a full hundred dollars off the price (which is nearly as much as the DS costs) Maybe if Sony cut their advertising budget and instead maybe made good games for the PSP, people would buy more. The DS has sold primarily on the strength of the first-party lineup, with games like New Super Mario Brothers and the brain training games, but the PSP lacks good games in general, especially ones published by Sony itself. They seem to be getting it right on the PS3 at this point (Heavenly Sword and Warhawk may convince me to cough up the 600 dollars, although it's a slim chance at this point), so why ignore the PSP?

Sony may have destroyed Nintendo's dominance of the console market, but their attempt to break the Big N's hold of the portable market seems to have misfired. Considering the lack of first party games for the PSP, sluggish sales despite a price cut, and the new advertising strategy, I'm betting the PSP isn't turning out nearly as well for Sony as a lot of people seem to believe. I wouldn't be surprised if this ended up being a one-generation experiment for Sony. But who knows? Microsoft lost millions on the first X-Box, but the 360 seems to have really taken off. But the way the momentum is going at this point, it doesn't look like Sony's catching up to the DS anytime soon.