Newsbrief: Nintendo's 3DS handheld has sold more than 5 million units in the United States since its launch in March 2011, the NPD Group reported on Thursday.
This news comes just three months after the console reached the 4.5 million unit milestone, and just one month before the launch of the revised 3DS XL.
The Nintendo 3DS got off to a rocky start after its initial release, but after a major price drop in July 2011, the system's sales picked up quite a bit. In fact, after one year on the market, the system had sold nearly twice as many units as the Nintendo DS did in the same time frame.
Alongside this news, Nintendo announced that it sold 155,000 3DS systems, 150,000 DS systems, and almost 95,000 Wii consoles in June 2012.
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I suspect that despite every tech story on every news site proclaiming that mobile has decimated the handheld, what we've really seen is the effect of natural console generation transition combined with medium to poor execution of launches and possibly a hint of recession blues. i.e. I reckon handhelds are actually performing independent of mobile. We'll see in the next two years or so.
But in terms of growth with the 3DS, Nintendo would need a few never-before-seen kooky types of games on it.
I feel there's not a lot more maneuvering Nintendo can do with the 3DS, hopefully they got some good R&D out of it and learned a few things about their customers.
Otherwise, I think they will be just eating the loses and moving on when the time comes. "
Funny, that selling 5 million 3DS handhelds in a single market (US) in a single year leads to comments like this. During this year Nintendo has come up with 3 millions sellers in the US (Zelda OoT 1 million, Mario Kart 1.75 million and Super Mario 3D Land 2.1 million), which clearly shows that Nintendo knows it's audience and knows what their customers want and more important is able to deliver, when it comes to actually producing the games these customers want. Additionally the console sales roughly equal all over the world, with the mentioned Nintendo titles selling equally well on a global scale.
But as they are Nintendo, people will never be satisfied.
For a while I've been trying to coin the terms 'posihype' and 'negahype'. Apple has unfathomable posihype while Nintendo has astounding negahype. Basically everything one does is gold while everything the other one does is dirt - weighting perceived performance up or down relative to their real world performance. I wish I had a numeric tool for assigning actual values to this (obviously difficult as we're talking about subjective humans creating an objective measure of subjectivism) but it really affects the share value and so is an important real world factor. So much so that given how ludicrously undervalued Nintendo shares are I'd be tempted to buy shares if it weren't for the fact that I know that even when they outperform analyst expectations their shares won't improve by nearly enough, while other companies would see more significant improvements just by announcing reduced losses.
What's really interesting is what drives this 'hype' value? I have no clue, but it seems to be irrespective of projections, equity, IP strength, fanbase, momentum, historical performance, competitor landscape, or anything else I can think of. Maybe it's just in the name. Listen, 10 years ago a heard one of those wild statistics that found 80% of customers would pay more for a Sony product without being able to explain why. Sony's posihype has undoubtedly waned but can you tell me why exactly? And has it actually been in tandem with their decline in performance? I think not.
Oh well.
interesting term, I tend to agree with you, on Sony, I think one important factor is, that there is always one company, that is valued in a special way by customers, because their products are charged with something beyond it's physical value and purpose. These products are carrying a certain feeling of cultural importance.
Sony achieved this status with the Walkman, a product, that people found life changing, even if it was only about hearing music on the go. It changed the way, people perceived their every day reality on the street, in the train, etc. Sony managed it to carry this relevance over to their other products and it worked for a while. I think the point, when people admit, they are willing to pay more for a product, just because it comes from a certain company is the end of the process, just before it collapses.
It means people already realised, that what they buy is not unique, it only is a special brand and this realisation is necessary for people to stop behaving this way.
I would go as far as to say, Sony's demise made room for another company to fill the gap and this company was Apple, people are projecting their wishes and desires onto Apple products, just as they did with Sony products. The arguments for Apple are different then for Sony, but in the end, both share, that these arguments aren't reational, but emotional.
Maybe Nintendo missed the opportunity to become what Apple is today by focusing on their products and on their game development capabilities, they didn't created this kind of hype around their products, as Apple did, for certain, because they just lost against the Playstation and the Playstation 2, which would have made it look awkward, if they tried to come up as the company with the life changing relevant product.
In my opinion, this wasn't a failure because it put them in the position to win the handheld race against Sony (in which Sony relied much to much on their former uniqueness image) and the race in this stationary console generation, without being in the situation Sony found itself after the PS2 and Apple will find itself in the future, in a situation where the company has to face the fact, that the consumers realised, they overvalued the brand and start looking for somebody else to admire.
Nintendo got a bad rap for a while due to not getting big 3rd party releases on N64. The cartridge format caused many 3rd parties to jump ship to CD. So, most of the better games were first party Nintendo games. This isn't necessarily bad, but this is also the time when games started pushing into psudo realism. Nintendo didn't get many of these titles, so they started getting hit with the kids machine label because of the types of games the first party offerings are. A label they still haven't been able to shake off. The GCube ran into the same issues as the N64, and the Wii basically told hardcore gamers to their face that Nintendo wasn't for them. I love first party Nintendo games as much as the next guy, but other than that, the offerings on the Wii are pretty damn slim for hardcore gamers. Couple that with the fact that other than a few games, it has next to nothing in the psudo realism shooter department that has exploded in recent years in the mainstream.
After all of that, Nintendo is finally trying to win back the hardcore crowd with the Wii U. Considering past experiences over the generations, I'm not surprised most hardcore gamers are completely dismissing it, and Nintendo, as a real contender overall. This is of course not true since they tapped a completely different market with the Wii, but casual gamers not are the ones that are going to be getting on message boards defending the Wii most of the time. So, most of the time you are going to see a random mainstream FPS gamer yelling doom and gloom against Nintendo.
I'm completely unbiased as I always end up purchasing all of the consoles, but I'm definitely the minority. Most people end up with 1 system, and Nintendo hasn't made it tough to NOT pick them as a only console to own. People have a choice between 1st party Nintendo titles... and... everything else. Well, unless you are a complete diehard Nintendo fan, people are clearly choosing the 360/PS3 offering.
I can only hope this all changes with the Wii U. Instead of having a Nintendo system as a first party game console, I would own a Nintendo console for... everything. A crazy thought I know. It hasn't happened since SNES days. Nintendo clearly has something there if hardcore gamers still buy their console just for the first party games, knowing that there probably won't be much else they care about. I can only hope they don't squander this opportunity. If Nintendo screws this up, I don't know how they would ever regain faith from hardcore/mainstream gamers again.
Exactly what I talked about, the 3DS is outselling the Nintendo DS, the most successful handheld in history, in every region of the world and people say "unit numbers are Ok". When outselling the best selling handheld ever means "Ok", there is no way to perform better then "Ok".
"Ok, here's another term "paupernomics", it's economics for paupers. Yes, the unit numbers are Ok, but 3DS sales aren't what they should be, if the 3DS was a better product."
That's more "pampernomics", economics for beginners, you can say of every product "sales are Ok, but not what they should be, if the product would be better", because you completely drop any comparability, if you say this about a product, that outsells it's massively successful predecessor during it's first 14 months (DS 13 million vs. 3DS 14 million), that is currently 25% ahead of the DS sales in the same period in the US and that outsells the combined competition in Japan every week for about 10 months now.
You didn't go back far enough. Nintendo upset a lot of the people when the NES caused the US console market pick up again. Some people in the industry didn't want to make console games. The restrictions they put on game releases just made them more enemies. Then there was the censorship they enforced on SNES games that started the first cries that Nintendo is kiddie.
@Cameron
I doubt there will be another handheld anytime soon that can sell like the DS just like I don't think a console will reach PS2 numbers next gen and maybe the one after. The 3DS still has a chance to get close to DS numbers if NSMB2 and the new brainage are killer apps . Nintendo would also need a new breakout killer app as well.
Still with that said the only handheld that sold better than the 3DS has after the price drop is the monster that was the GBA. Nintendo hasn't got a handheld launch right since that (GBA) was launched.
"Christian, smoking monkeys sold better than the original DS, hell, PSP was selling better than DS when it first launched.."
The first year sales of the PSP in the US (the only territory, where it outsold the DS) where fine, the problem with the PSP began when these sales began to decline sharply.
But more important, the 3DS outsells the DS globally and outside the US, the DS sold well in it's first year, in the US it's sales where in fact hindered by the then still dominating GBA.
According to Nintendo's financial report, the 3DS sold 17 million units by the end of march 2012 which puts it on par with the GBA after a comparable time. The GBA is the fastest selling console of all time and the 3DS sells at a similar pace.
This means, according to you, having the fastest selling console of all time is having "Ok" sales.
Source:
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/library/historical_data/pdf/consolida ted_sales_e120
3.pdf
I like your phrases and analysis.
Gotta keep using them to get them minted and coined!