Sony recently announced that they have now passed the 1 million downloaded PSP Minis mark worldwide, with this occurring just over 9 months since the service launched. The store now boasts more than 85 Minis titles, with most playable on both the PSP and PS3.
The post notes the top 10 ‘most popular titles’:
1. Age of Zombies
2. Monopoly
3. Fieldrunners
4. Zombie Tycoon
5. Bloons
6. Spot The Differences!
7. Pinball Fantasies
8. Mahjongg Artifacts: Chapter 2
9. Yetisports Pengu Throw
10. Breakquest
This is a pretty big milestone for the PSP and Sony, whose launch of the PSP Go at the same time cannot be characterized as anything but a dismal failure, regardless of their attempts to recast it as an experiment.
I have several PSP Minis myself, including several from the Top 10 as well as crazy stuff like Monsters (probably) Stole My Princess and so on. In general I have been pleased – the games are typically under 100MB and offer a reasonable amount of gaming for ~$5 each.
Of course, I have mentioned several times the difficulty Sony has because games like Fieldrunners cost twice as much as a PSP Mini as they do for the iPhone! I differentiate ‘downloads’ and ‘sales’ in the title because Sony has been notorious in recent years at putting out the numbers of PSP and PS3 units they ‘shipped’ as being their sales numbers – to the point where one quarter back a few years they ended up with negative overall sales!
However, to put the ‘million downloads’ milestone in perspective, the iPhone game Doodle Jump recently passed the 5 million PAID download mark. Here is what the article says:
iPhone games developer Lima Sky says that its Doodle Jump game has now sold more than five million downloads on the App Store.
It’s the first paid game to reach that milestone, although free titles like Tap Tap Revenge and Paper Toss have gone way beyond it.
“We are thrilled to see how much Doodle Jump means to millions of Doodle Jumpers around the globe,” says president and co-founder Igor Pusenjak.
Lima Sky started as a two-man operation, making the game one of the standout independent success stories of the App Store.
The game has maintained a $0.99 price point ever since it launched, meaning that it’s generated $4.95 million in sales – $3.46 million for Lima Sky after Apple’s cut.
The reason I mention this? Because assuming a $4.99 average price for PSP Minis, the entire system has earned about $5 million in sales – or roughly the same as a single very popular game on the iTunes App Store in roughly the same time period.
The other slightly disheartening fact is that many folks I know have no PSP and are playing them on the PS3, and several newer and recently announced Minis seem to be noticing the trend and look to be a better experience on the console. While I hope this works well for the small developers doing the work, as a PSP enthusiast it is yet another kick in the gut, as it feels like the ‘made for portable, bite-sized gaming’ mantra that launched the Minis line could easily be lost. Let’s hope not!
So to Sony I say congratulations on the milestone and hope that you will take this moment to refocus your efforts on delivering on the promise of the great handheld gaming system you launched back more than 5 years ago.
Source: Playstation Blog
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