Market analysts are a little bit like Paris Hilton and the Anna Nicole Smith story — the mainstream media just can't seem to get enough of them. Whenever a new product or pricing scheme is announced, reporters rush to gather the opinions of what I can only imagine are corporate suits who wouldn't know a fun game if it rolled over their city and absorbed them into its mass. Wedbush Morgan's video game industry analyst Michael Patcher weighed in this week on the future prosepcts for the (now cheaper) Sony PSP, and he had some supportive comments for the beleaguered company. We already know that the DS is dominating every market in which the PSP is a competitor, leading many to conclude that the PSP has been a "failed" experiment. Patcher takes a different view, arguing that the PSP is not really in direct competition with the DS at all:

"I don't think Sony will "beat" the DS, nor do I think that they aspire to do so. Nintendo has something different to offer with its touch screen and deep library of first party titles, and Sony is not in a position to compete with that offering. Rather, the DS is like a souped-up GBA, while the PSP is like a miniature PS2. Games for the two devices are different, and the gaming experience is quite different. I think that the only people who care about the DS-PSP sales battle are the media."

Meanwhile, Billy Pidgeon from IDC argues that the PSP is a success because it is helping "hardcore" Ps2 players get more comfortable with the idea of handheld gaming:

"I don't see the PSP as competing with the DS so much as bringing in the core console demographic to handhelds, and the PSP has convergent value as a multimedia player that appeals to that group."

While the PSP certainly offers different kinds of gaming experiences and is geared toward a potentially different audience, our recently gathered data from readers of PVG suggests that most consumers are likely to choose one or the other console, but not necesarily both. If this doesn't sound like competition, I am not sure what does.

What do you think? Is the PSP really so different from the DS in terms of its offerings that the two devices can't be said to be competing?