I knew this was coming, and I've said for months that if Sony actually has 1M day one, it's not going to sell out. Many are trying to compare it to the PS2 launch, but that's just stupid.
There are a number of reasons why there were no PS2's available.
1) The PS2 ONLY had 391,245 units sold at launch. It was SEVERELY constrained. By comparison, Sony shipped 1M PSP units.
2) The PS2 was hyped beyond any system we've ever seen, with Newsweek, Time, etc covers and endless media coverage. And it's launch date was known for 6 months, which let people plan on it as an EVENT. By comparison, we didn't know about the US launch date until very recently (what was it? 6-8 weeks ago). And Sony's marketing of the PSP has got to go down as one of the worst of all time (From a launch day perspective, who knows maybe the blitz coming will change that)
3) The PS2 was launched during the holidays. Many people were going on and on about how Johnny wasn't going to have a PS2 under his tree.
Interestingly, let's look at the GBA, Xbox, & GCN launches.
1) None of them sold out first day.
2) I remember people praising Nintendo for having excellent supplies of the GBA and not creating an "artificial shortage" like Sony did.
3) They sold phenomenally well in their respective launch months.
I'm certainly not ready to call the PSP an "incredible success" from a sales perspective. I've certainly seen 95%+ positive responses to the PSP, so I'm certainly not worried about it, but I openly criticized Sony for not having the "core system" and we all assumed that the supplies would be so constrained that they would sell ALL of thier value packs. In the end, it's one day, that from every store I've seen has been incredibly well recieved, but not an instant sellout (except from many gamestores, who had 95%+ of the preorders).
I think anybody who thinks the PSP is a FLOP is certifiably insane. I expect it to easily hit incredible numbers for March's NPD and the truest indicator of success is satisfaction and other than the "pixel" issues, most everyone seems to be raving about the system.
In the end, as usual, it's a victim of our own expectations (although we did hear Sony and some retailers crow that day 1 could be a sellout at some level). In the prediction thread, nobody seemed to think that Sony would come particulary close to a million sells, with the average prognostications being ~700k or so (just my impressions, I'll have to look to be sure). If that number was correct, we'd still see a shitload of systems on shelves and that's AFTER April 2nd (which is when March's NPD ends).
