Nintendo boss slams PSP as DS shipment target is raised

Sony's forthcoming PlayStation Portable handheld will fail to attract newcomers to gaming, according to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, whose comments come as shipment targets for the DS are raised once again.

Speaking to journalists in Japan, Iwata-san praised the DS' ability to attract new people to gaming, including young women who traditionally don't play videogames, and said that he doubts that the PSP will be able to match this success.

Reiterating a line taken increasingly commonly by Nintendo, he argued that people are drifting away from gaming because they are alienated by the increasing complexity of the medium, and uninterested in the approach of simply using technology to deliver more impressive graphics.

"PSP has been created with the assumption that the golden success formula is still working," he told reporters at the Foreign Correspondants' Club, according to an Associated Press article. "We don't believe that. We're making every effort so that people will say we were right."

His comments came as Nintendo increased its shipment plans for the DS once again, with both Japan and North America set to receive 400,000 more units apiece of the console before the end of the year, bringing total shipments by the year-end to 2.8 million.

That's 40 per cent ahead of the most recent projections for the console, which is still expected to sell around 5 million units by the end of Nintendo's financial year in March 2005, and has already sold an estimated 1.2 million units - 500,000 in Japan and 700,000 in North America.

Iwata also revealed that Nintendo is boosting its peak production plans for the Nintendo DS, and hopes to be able to turn out 1.5 million units a month on a regular basis, rising to 2 million a month in busy periods.