Sony halting PSX production?

TOKYO--According to Weekly Gendai magazine, Sony has halted production of its PSX due to lagging sales. The PSX is a hybrid PlayStation 2 and personal video and DVD recorder with broadband capabilities. Released in December 2003 in Japan, the PSX sold 40,000 units on the day of its launch and continued to sell in the five digits up until the end of the month. However, its sales began to decline at the beginning of 2004.

"We have a structure where we run our production lines according to the movement of demands [in the market]," a Sony spokesperson told the magazine. "We are currently deciding on the timing of when to restart production, with consideration given to adjustments in our inventory." E-mails and calls to American Sony representatives went unreturned.

While Sony anticipated the machine to be a success, the PSX was dogged by misfortune. Last holiday season, controversy erupted after consumers learned that the machine would ship without many of its originally announced capabilities, such as PlayStation broadband support and MP3 playback. Sony has since released two firmware patches for the PSX--one in February and one this month--that add to the machine the omitted capabilities.

"A lot of things have been said about the failure of the PSX inside the company, but it was probably due to the unrealistic way that its development was conducted," says an unnamed source close to Sony. "The development [of the PSX] was being handled by the games division and the next-generation Blu-ray Disc development division. The [PSX's] controls were being developed by the games division, while the Blu-ray Disc division was doing the AV parts. But the divisions couldn't work too well together. As a result, the capabilities of the PSX became incoherent, and it ended up as a machine that's neither a game console nor a DVD recorder."

The Weekly Gendai article marks the second time that the relationship between Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony's Blu-ray Disc division has been mentioned. An article last month in the magazine Asahi PC addressed the possibility that Sony’s next-generation game console may use Blu-ray Discs (BD-ROM) as its media.