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Playstation One game sales very low for the Xperia Play. Sony Ericsson isn’t worried though.

Sony Ericsson’s Android gaming device, the Xperia Play, has been out for a little bit now and with the ability to play games using the control pad, you would think people would be all for buying Playstation One games. Being a Playstation certified device comes with some benefits, sales apparently isn’t one of them though… yet.

According to recent information from Sony Ericsson head of market development Dominic Neil-Dwyer, Playstation One game sales have been rather low. In fact, looking at the numbers, we would say they are impressively low. Destruction Derby has sold between 500-1,000 downloads, Syphon Filter 100-500, MediEvil 100-500, Cool Boarders 2 100-500 and Jumping Flash 50-100 downloads. Considering you can upload a game onto the Android Market and get 500-1000 downloads in a very short period of time, if your game isn’t total crap, these numbers for Playstation One game sales are pretty amazing after this much time passing.

Sony Ericsson isn’t worried though about the sales figures:

“I think there’s also an awareness thing for people that are getting their hands on the device and where they are choosing to purchase games. There’s only a few, at the minute, PlayStation One titles there, and there’s more coming on a regular basis, and there’s the whole PlayStation as a content provider exclusive to the device, the story about that, that will emerge and people will see,” said Neil-Dwyer. “So, there’s no concerns, it’s a revolutionary device, it’s shaking up the market, we’re very pleased with it. In terms of getting the PlayStation Certified program out, generally, we’re very happy. I think we’ll make a full assessment of if it has achieved our expectations fully, further down the line, so we’re very happy”.

“We know there’s a lot more to come that we’re not, obviously, releasing yet. We’re releasing as we go, rather than telling everyone the full story, and I think everyone appreciates that you have a good line-up at the start of selling a device, because it is a smartphone and it has a good line-up – and that line-up will grow – and the feedback we got on that line-up is that it is a good line-up, so we’re very happy where we are,” he added.

Part of the problem is that when buying an Xperia Play and knowing that it is Playstation Certified and able to run Playstation One games, the selection currently available is also pretty low. This won’t help draw interest to the Playstation One games if there are very few smash-hit titles from the Playstation One console era available on the Xperia Play. More hit titles available at launch would have probably helped to some degree but even with some of the games currently available which used to be hugely popular, like Destruction Derby, sales are still low.

So why do you think the sales are so bad? Just not good enough draw to the titles available? Current games are just not that popular anymore or something else? What could be done to help? Sound off time! Let us know in the comments below!

Website Referenced: Playstation Lifestyle (Full Interview)

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