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PSP sales have been really good, just behind the DS. Joystick talks to them about the PSP’s sales.

Joystiq: Talk about the impact on PSP sales that you’ve seen with the recent retail success of the DS Lite.

JK: There has been no impact on sales. We have had steady sales since before the DS Lite and to today. Looking at it objectively they’ve had a very successful launch, obviously, and I think they’re seeing a lot of Nintendo loyalists jump back in the market and there’s a lot of retail initiatives to trade in your old DS for a DS Lite. If you look at the numbers, they did very well in June. But, if you look at our numbers since launch until now, we have outsold the DS by approximately 900,000 units in North America. Statistically speaking they had a holiday head start on the PSP, so in terms who have sold more overall has been a back and forth.

Joystiq: What has Sony learned from the PSP?

JK: We’ve learned lot of things. The first thing was how we market the product. You don’t want to be all things to everyone because then you’re nothing to no one. So, we’ve really tried to make gaming the heart of what we do and added many multifunctional elements to differentiate ourselves from the DS or the Video iPods. On the product side, it’s constant learning. We look at consumer demand then place that in the product. This is not a product that sits on shelves and lives or dies, we can constantly update it. The UMD situation is an area we have been adapting to all along. How we operate in the download area is key. That’s ultimately where we want to be as far as overall content like music, movies and games. We want to be in a place where a target consumer can easily access content to put on their Memory Stick. That’s not to say we wouldn’t want to continually utilize UMD, because we do. There’s a tandem marketing push there.

Joystiq: As far as software sales, a recent report came out that showed the DS had more million or more selling titles than the PSP. Is that a concern?

JK: Obviously software is where we make our living, but I don’t see it as being a huge issue. I think there’s a growing strength in that kind of middle range that we’ve seen. Nintendo has some loyalists that buy their branded titles, like Mario, no matter what, so that is what you’re seeing.

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