Japanese outlets quote Sony as saying that manufacture of the short-lived handheld has ended so that the company can focus on the NGP.
One day after rumors spread that production of the PSP Go had ceased, several reports out of Japan indicated that the handheld’s short lifespan is officially at an end. Japanese website AV Watch quotes Sony Computer Entertainment officials as saying production and shipment of the portable has ended. The site quotes an SCE spokesperson as saying the handheld was discontinued so that the company could “focus” on the Next Generation Portable, due out later this year.
This account of events was backed up by a report on Japanese tech blog Phileweb, which was translated by gaming blog Andria Sang. That report said that the company would continue to sell its remaining stock of the device. However, Andria Sang found that Sony Computer Entertainment Japan has marked the PSP Go product pages on the Japanese PlayStation site with the notation “shipment ended.” The handheld is still in stock on the US Sony Style online store, and US Sony reps had not yet commented on the matter.
After being unveiled with great fanfare–following a colossal leak–at the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo, the PSP Go was launched that October in North America. It was, however, not the runaway hit Sony hoped it would be. Though US sales figures for the handheld variant have never been released by the NPD Group, retail-tracking firm Media Create broke them out each week for the Japanese market. In almost every instance, the portable finished dead last on the hardware chart, selling just 356 units in the island nation during the week of April 4-10, compared to 35,478 PSP-3000s.
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