Third Parties Are Ditching the PSP [Playstation Portable]

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The sad thing about the PSP is that it's a solid piece of hardware that people, mostly in Japan, are buying, but in humorless irony, third parties are refusing to support the platform. In this graph by famed gaming magazine EDGE, you see in hard numbers that there are almost no more PSP games coming out this year than the year of its launch. In fact, game releases peaked for the system way back in 2006. And if the downward trend continues, 2009 could be plain sad.
EDGE argues that developers may be afraid of the platform due to bad precedents. They cite Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, the most successful PSP title of all time, as selling 1.7 million copies. Not bad, not amazing. But the follow-up, GTA: Vice City Stories sold only 700,000 copies. That's a drop of 60%.
I see a lot of reasons why this drop could have happened beyond the PSP itself, chief among them being that gamers had already gotten a lot of GTA on the PS2 (including alternate versions of both these PSP titles). But without many US developers making original titles for the PSP, we'll probably never know the system's potential in terms of its sales or its hardware. [EDGE via Kotaku]


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