DS More Popular Than PSP Among Japanese Adults

According to a recent survey in the Japanese magazine Otonafami, out of 1000 gamers 20 years of age or older, 25 percent said that they owned a Nintendo DS, while only 14 percent said that they had purchased a Sony PSP19 percent of respondents claimed ownership of both. The DS launched 10 days before the PSP in Japan last December. Japanese sales figures show the DS currently at about 2.2 million units, while the PSP has sold roughly 1.4 million units.

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For those gamers that said they currently do not own either handheld, purchase intent still favored Nintendo’s system over Sony’s, although the numbers were a bit closer. 35 percent of those without a handheld said that they are planning on buying a DS in the near future, while 31 percent said they would soon be picking up a PSP, and 19 percent intend to purchase both.

The Otonafami survey seems to favor the DS when it comes to software as well. The software attach ratio for Nintendo’s handheld seems to be far better, as 23 percent of DS owners claimed that they had 6 or more games in their collection. By comparison, only 10 percent of the PSP crowd said that they owned more than 6 games. The average PSP owner seems to be buying only one to three titles for the portable. Of the PSP owners surveyed, 27 percent said they had only one game, 24 percent said they owned two, and 22 percent said they had three titles.

Strangely, 2 percent of respondents actually said they had no software for either handheld. This means that for DS users, these gamers are likely just playing Game Boy Advance titles on the new hardware, while PSP owners are probably using the device for its other multimedia functions. Indeed, many PSP users commented that they actually view the portable more as a multimedia device than a game machine. DS owners said that they really enjoyed the backwards compatibility of the DS and the touchscreen functionality.

Interestingly, for all the concern over the PSP’s battery life prior to the portable’s launch, most PSP owners in the survey said that they found the battery life to be long and much better than they expected. On the software side, though, many PSP owners said that the current video game offerings are either mediocre quality or just PlayStation 2 ports. They also lamented the PSP’s often long loading times and the fact that its games sometimes freezesomething that’s far less likely to occur on a cartridge-based system.

Source:GameDAILY BIZ