NGP will 'easily best' North American PSP sales - Analyst

Last week, Electronic Entertainment Design and Research analyst Jesse Divnich offered his best estimate for the price tag of Sony's Next Generation Portable, suggesting it would clock in around $300 to $350. Today he offered a few more expectations for Sony's second portable system, specifically stating that it should "easily beat" PSP sales in North America.

In a note to clients and publishers today, Divnich was optimistic about the NGP's prospects, particularly in North America and Europe, where he said the original PSP had relatively low adoption rates. If Sony can ensure the NGP arrives at a competitive price and with retailer and publisher support in line, Divnich expects the NGP "to handsomely surpass sales of its predecessor."

"Observers tend to forget that the PSP was incredibly successful at launch in North America, selling more units in its first year than the Nintendo DS," Divnich said. "Long-term, however, concerns about Sony's digital strategy, lack of publisher incentive and piracy, ultimately resulted in a decreasing support from third-party publishers and a reduction in retail shelf space. EEDAR believes that the aforementioned problems of the PSP era will be resolved with the NGP."

As a result, Divnich advised third-party publishers to be early adopters for the system. He pointed to Ubisoft as an example, noting the success the publisher had with its initial lineup of games for the Kinect launch.

"While MotionSports and Fighters Uncaged may not have been noticed by all observers, both titles shipped-in over 500,000 units worldwide, and generated over $47 million in revenue combined," Divnich noted. "It is clear that Ubisoft benefited by being an early supporter of the Kinect and it reinforces the early supporter strategy."

If that weren't reason enough, Divnich noted that most successful new IPs are launched in the first 18 months of a system's life cycle. With console life spans growing longer, that could make such opportunities for new IP less frequent.