Time finally appears to have caught up with Sony’s pioneering PlayStation Portable.Sony is pulling the plug on its hand-held PlayStation Portable video game machine after 10 years.
The Japanese electronics and entertainment company has been pushing the successor machine, PlayStation Vita. Tokyo-based Sony said Tuesday that PSP shipments will end in Japan this month and later this year in Europe and Africa.
More than 76 million PSP machines were sold, as of two years ago, the last time a tally was taken. The PSP went on sale in December 2004.
Machines devoted to games are struggling against the popularity of smartphones and other devices. Sony reported a $1.3 billion loss for last fiscal year and is expecting to stay in the red this year.Sony Vita has not sold in significant numbers. Sony does not release the cumulative global unit sales of the Vita and combines it with PSP tallies.
Sony’s handheld game machine also faced stiff competition from Japanese rival Nintendo Co.’s 3DS. But Nintendo has also struggled to keep momentum going for its game machines.
Let’s talk about how rad the PSP is. Did you know its main encryption processor is called Kirk, and its secondary encryption processor is called Spock? Other specialised units include Tachyon, Baryon and Pommel. The first model had just 32 MB of RAM, which is almost nothing, and yet it can run pretty gorgeous games
