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Forums - Sales Discussion - 3DS hits 50 "million" sellers at retail!

zorg1000 on 13 February 2017
Teeqoz said:
I do wonder though, what is it that causes handhelds to consistently have much lower attach rates than home consoles? I have two hypotheses. The first one is that the average age of handheld players/owners might be lower than the average age of home console players/owners, and less disposable income leads to fewer games being bought (although that is partially made up for by more free time, thus more time disposable for playing games). My other hypothesis is that people are more likely to buy multiple versions of a handheld than a home console, largely because it's cheaper, so it's easier to justify the purchase. I don't really have evidence for this, it's just anecdotal but all the people I know that owns handhelds (or used to own handhelds) owned several of the same handheld (I have a friend that owned 4 different DSs, even though none of them broke).

Another possibility is families with multiple children each have their own seperate device but share games.

If you have 3 kids it makes sense to buy 3 3DS' but doesn't really make sense to buy 3 seperate copies of New Super Mario, 3 copies of Luigi's Mansion & 3 copies of Ocarina of Time. Instead you would likely get 3 3DS' and one copy of each game that they can share.

Obviously that doesn't work for multiplayer games that require multiple copies to play like Mario Kart, Smash Bros or Pokemon.



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irstupid on 13 February 2017
RolStoppable said:
Teeqoz said:
I do wonder though, what is it that causes handhelds to consistently have much lower attach rates than home consoles? I have two hypotheses. The first one is that the average age of handheld players/owners might be lower than the average age of home console players/owners, and less disposable income leads to fewer games being bought (although that is partially made up for by more free time, thus more time disposable for playing games). My other hypothesis is that people are more likely to buy multiple versions of a handheld than a home console, largely because it's cheaper, so it's easier to justify the purchase. I don't really have evidence for this, it's just anecdotal but all the people I know that owns handhelds (or used to own handhelds) owned several of the same handheld (I have a friend that owned 4 different DSs, even though none of them broke).

My hypothesis is that handheld and home console ownership often overlap (pick any combination of manufacturers) and most of the gaming time is spent at home, making it an uphill battle for handhelds to compete. This is further strengthened by most publishers having a preference for home consoles, thus putting their best efforts there. In other words, if each generation you broke down how many worthwhile games were published for handhelds and how many for home consoles (all manufacturers combined), home consoles would comfortably win every time. The gap should be so big and obvious that we do not have to make actual lists.

The relationship between home consoles and handhelds has been changing in Japan, so the differences in tie ratio should be much less pronounced than they are in America and Europe. It's been a while since I've looked at the numbers.

That and advertising.

How well are handheld games advertised? Do you see million dollar ads on TV showing off some amazing CG commercial?

Hardly. Look at those 88 PS4 million seller games and look at the 50 million seller games on 3DS. i'm betting one side got more exposure come release date and thus probably had a million on day 1. You can probably recal the excitement on forums around many of those games release dates. Except for like a new POkemon, handheld games don't generate much buzz.



KrspaceT on 13 February 2017
irstupid said:
RolStoppable said:

My hypothesis is that handheld and home console ownership often overlap (pick any combination of manufacturers) and most of the gaming time is spent at home, making it an uphill battle for handhelds to compete. This is further strengthened by most publishers having a preference for home consoles, thus putting their best efforts there. In other words, if each generation you broke down how many worthwhile games were published for handhelds and how many for home consoles (all manufacturers combined), home consoles would comfortably win every time. The gap should be so big and obvious that we do not have to make actual lists.

The relationship between home consoles and handhelds has been changing in Japan, so the differences in tie ratio should be much less pronounced than they are in America and Europe. It's been a while since I've looked at the numbers.

That and advertising.

How well are handheld games advertised? Do you see million dollar ads on TV showing off some amazing CG commercial?

Hardly. Look at those 88 PS4 million seller games and look at the 50 million seller games on 3DS. i'm betting one side got more exposure come release date and thus probably had a million on day 1. You can probably recal the excitement on forums around many of those games release dates. Except for like a new POkemon, handheld games don't generate much buzz.

They also are slow burning sellers. They don't sell millions at once unless they are Pokemon, but they continue to sell decently for a while. Look how long Robobot kept popping up in top selling Japanese games. They also can get boosts from Nintendo Selects and bundle sales: Ocarina got a 300,000 sales boost this year after so many years on the market while we all saw Mario Kart 7's surprise return to prominence. 

It also doesn't need to sell as much: 3DS games are not nearly as expensive to make, so you aren't going to find a 3DS game that is a financial blunder for selling millions like Order 1886.



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COKTOE on 13 February 2017

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Flilix on 13 February 2017

I think the number of million sellers on 3DS is lower than on PS4 mostly because of the smaller library. The 3DS hasn't much more than 50 games that are actually fun.
Just compare the best selling 3DS games to these on PS4. There isn't much difference there.
But if you go to the 50st best selling game on PS4, you'll see it's Ratchet and Clank, which is still quite popular.