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Phoeniks.Wright on 28 April 2011
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Kenryoku_Maxis said:
Phoeniks.Wright said:

Sorry, but no. Gameboy had an excellent launch, with demand easily outstripping supply, with great games, Tetris, Super mario Land, Gennis and baseball most notably, and at $90, not 200. So the question is, why have terrible launches for the next handhelds? But that's another topic.

Also, the reason I would agree with those people is that the 3DS seems to be following the philosophy of the PSP. So if we were to take current DS and PSP sales, the 3DS would sell less than half of it's predecessor. Count in that Nintendo wants to expand the gaming audience supposedly, and you can quickly see why the 3DS, in that sense, will be a failure.

The original Game Boy did indeed have some powerful early hitters.  But it still only launched with 4 games in America and 6 in Japan/Europe.  This is very similar to the DS launch, which only launched in America with 4 games and more in Japan/Europe shortly after.

But besides this, what I was trying to get across, and still am, is that you can't compare the PSP to the 3DS.  The 3DS is Nintendos 5th gen Handheld and is building off both the reputation of the Game Boy and DS.  The PSP was Sony's first attempt at a handheld and took years to get to the popularity level it is now.  And even with a pretty good launch, the PSP didn't start selling well for a long time.  Compared to the original DS which sold out consistently in its first year with hardly any good games (until games like Kirby's Canvas Curse, WarioWare Touched and Jump Superstars came out).

Now compare this to the 3DS.  Already having near 100 titles announced for it and by the end of the year, having dozens of good games like Professor Layton, Inazuma Eleven, Resident Evil, MGS, Dead or Alive, Paper Mario, Kid Icarus and if what Miyamoto says is true, the new 3D Mario game.  No handheld in history has ever seen this much support in its first year.

Now, explain to me how 3DS is going to 'fail'?  The only thing people seem to be complaining about is the price and battery life.  And I can tell you, the vast majority of people who buy the thing will be buying it for the games, not its battery life.  Only tech geeks and hardcore internet servers (like us) will even hear about its battery life, or care.  Plus, in a year or two, it'll probably drop in price, if not have a '3DS Lite' out.

Launching with 4 heavy hitters is waay better than 4 normal games, so GB's alunch was much better.

But coming back to the 3DS, want to mention, the reputation of the PS1 & 2 sure didn't help the PS3 at all, GC only did 21 mill whilst the Wii has jst passed 86 mill, so that argument seems shakey to me. As for the games I see mostly from what you've listed console games, now put on a handheld. Which incidently was the PSP's strategy to beat the DS, and look how that turned out.

And when I say fail, I mean relative to Nintendo's current mission, as stated by Iwata and other execs, which is to expand the gaming population, but to do that, you'd need to outsell the DS, and looking at the current games for and announced on the 3DS, that will most definetly not happen.