PSP games surprisingly cheap to make

It should come as no surprise that the Japanese market is completed dominated by handhelds right now. Thanks to both the DS and the PSP, the handheld sector has grown to control 63.2 percent of the entire video game market there. Sales of both hardware and software rose 13.9% in 2005, as consumers just can't get enough gaming on the go. To make all of you fanboys happy, I should also give you some numbers you'll throw at a DS fanboy's face: According to Gamespot, Nintendo exported 7.34 million DS systems while Sony exported 11.36 million PSPs in 2005.

Also, more numbers you'll want to use in your online fury against DS owners involve how cheap PSP games are to make. The claims that it costs as much as a PS2 game are just wrong. The average cost to develop on PlayStation 2 is 139 million yen ($1.2 million) a game. A PSP game costs on average 63 million yen ($541,000). Sure, that's still more than developing a Nintendo DS game, which costs an average of 39.8 million yen ($342,000). But when you consider how much more technology goes into a PSP game, it's still not too expensive at all.