Sony: PlayStation Vita will break UK launch record

It's six years old and still the UK's fastest-selling games console at launch - but Sony is betting big on PSP's successor, telling Eurogamer: "We will beat that with Vita."

"We're planning for a condition of success," PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan told us last week in London. "Launch quantities will sell out - I think that's looking pretty certain".

Pressed on whether he believed that meant Vita would beat PSP's figure, Ryan said: "Subject to supply, yes, it is our belief that we will beat that with Vita."

PSP, which launched in the UK in September 2005, sold over 185,000 units at launch. This number was expected to be toppled earlier this year by Nintendo's 3DS, with the company predicting only the week before launch it would sell "comfortably over 150,000, if not more like 200,000".

In the event, the system sold 113,000, according to Nintendo's own internal figures. One reason cited for 3DS' relatively sluggish performance since has been a lack of must-buy games - a situation Sony is keen to avoid.

"Looking at the competition, perhaps the launch line-up was not as strong as they'd have liked it to be," said Ryan. "We have always had in our minds that we needed to have a great line-up at launch and we're very pleased with how that's panning out.

"I think it's comfortably the strongest line-up we've had for any platform launch and I've been around since the year dot."

Sony confirmed it's first-party Vita launch line-up for Europe last week.

Asked if the system had a 'killer app' for day one, Ryan highlighted Uncharted: Golden Abyss as "looking very much in that category".

Meanwhile, Ryan also revealed that, while he expected Vita initially to appeal "to our typical core gaming market", the company would "take it younger rather more quickly and perhaps deliberately than we did with PSP".