All I know is that My girlfriend and I are celebrating our five year anniversary in April... by getting eachother a DS (she wants a pink one). It'll be the first gaming device she's owned since the original gameboy. The DS is unstopable.

Exactly. People are arguing with me, and all I am doing is reporting what Nintendo said. I definitely agree with the two of you that this might be a dumb idea, or perhaps completely false, or misinformation. I report benkonobi, YOU decide

Even if Nintendo stop making DS for a year they would be ok: In the Top 20 games in Japan this week the DS has 14 games 7-1st party 7-3rd party The DS has to much support from 3rd parties. For the 21-50 there are 13 3rd party DS games and only 9 1st party games. Nintendo can afford to shift resources and not lose the handheld market.

If only Nintendo had drastically increased their investment into software R&D, established some new wide-appeal, low-budget franchises, and started farming out a ton of work in "second party" relationships, in anticipation of the need to support 2 systems... Pah, that's ridiculous.

Hopefully they stop making it tomorrow, all DS games are thrown into a huge pyre, Nintendo is obliterated as a company, and its stain on the history of mankind is forgotten forever.

RE: the shift in resources. I think it means that Nintendo will shift all of their resources in 1/2 party devs to the Wii with the exception of maybe 2 groups. These 2 groups will continue to put out 3-4 first party hitters throughout the years and let the 3rd parties keep pushing the DS library and making them a lot of money. Thus, as an incentive to keep the 3rd party relationship with the Nintendo and it's Wii. Then once the Wii's userbase is 20+m in late 2008 then can realign to a more 60/40 split between the wii/ds respectively.

It won't, & this is why: They are catering to both sexes & conceivable age demographic in some form via their software. (not all 1st party produced, though my point still stands) Nintendogs, BT, Love+Berry, Tamagotchi, FFs, DQs, (including spin-offs) English Training, Tetris, AC, NSMB, Kanji Training, Cooking Navi, 1000 Recipes, NSMB, etc, etc. It's already surpassed the GBA ltd of 15,324,990 there, with this number 15,725,274. It will surpass the PS2's 20,378,812 at this rate in less than two months. (MC numbers) With more million & multi-million sellers in JPN than the PS1, PS2, GCN, (not difficult) DC, N64, etc.

I'm waiting for DS to gain momentum, as it's definitely a far cry from GBA outside Japan, though to be fair, GBC had faded more than GBA has. This year should be a lot stronger than last, though. As for Japan, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to fade (to some extent) within the next year. The simple issue of market saturation prevents it from selling at this pace for much longer. Its total sales are impossible to predict. No telling what Nintendo will do. They could release a DS2 in 3 years, or they could stretch the current one for another 10. Agreed that PSP has no chance of taking the portable market, nor should it have been expected to, but they've cracked into it nicely. If Sony can get 35-40% from what used to be a monopoly in 5 years, that's a major success. Microsoft needs to start thinking about Xbox Portable soon.

Actually, it looks like DS sales should easily chase down GBA sales in Europe too. GBA only sold about 21 million in "others" regions, and DS is now at 12 million. Its only NA where there is any question about passing up GBA... We'll have to see if DS can do 8-10 million this year... 500K in Febuary has to be a good sign... But we'll have to see if the 2007 lineup shapes up a little better, quite frankly... I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to fade either... But on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if it went on to sell 40M in Japan... Its obviously hitting a wider audience there, meaning it won't hit a saturation point below 25 million as previous systems have, and we don't really know where the saturation point is now. Yeah, thats the problem in predicting sales. I'd like to think the Iwata-era will bring long lives for systems. First of all, PSP isn't hugely profitable. It was supposed to buoy PlayStation financially during the early years of PS3 and wind-down of PS2. Thats not happening. Furthermore, while getting 35-40% marketshare (which its falling below already, btw) is nice, "getting a foothold in the market" as you seem to be implying is nonsense. Every market leader in VG history has gotten there with their first entry. They won't. The portable gaming market isn't perceived as a long-term threat to their PC OS monopoly like Google, PlayStation or iPod. And thats really all MS is interested in.

The first year or two are rarely profitable. If they are, your system's probably overpriced. Wii's potentially the one exception to this. Every market leader in VG history? So that would be Atari. Who had no competition. Nintendo. Who had no competition. Nintendo again. Who had no competition again. And Sony. Whose competition committed suicide. Sony actually has a fight on its hands with PSP, much like Microsoft is fighting on the console front. Microsoft wants to stem slowing growth. A portable gaming entry would be one avenue worth exploring. Though certainly focusing on just growing the Xbox at this point is the chief objective of the entertainment division.