@ buzzard relative DOES matter. Momentum DOES matter since it shows the future rather then just the past.
Nintendo's profit was actually lower in 09 then 08 if you look at the data. Additionally the sales of the DS and Wii have clearly leveled off and are going down year over year. The same is true of software, especially for the DS.
The primary reason for this is almost certainly mobile phones as you can see in the immense growth of Apple in the mobile gaming space. Apple has more then 4 billion app downloads at a rate of about a billion every few months and accelerating. the DS has had less then 600 million sales of games total, the average user of an ipod or iphone downloads more apps in one or two months then the average DS buyer has bought over their entire ownership of the console.
Additionally Apple makes NO games and thus the thousands of games that have sold thousands to millions of copies are all from developers, many of them small indy developers. The Apple App store is in many ways the opposite of the Nintendo platforms in that it is a system of thousands of small developers making games (and money) instead of more or less just the Nintendo monolith having real success moving software. Nintendo has sold nearly 300 million out of the 600 million total games sold which leaves very little space for everyone else.
Also the point is that Nintendo is either stagnating or actually decreasing in sales depending on which numbers you look at while Apple has been experiencing double and even triple digit platform growth worldwide. There are already a large number of platform exclusive games that are iphone only and never make it to the PSP or DS, that will only increase as the base grows.
By the end of the year, at current growth rates, the ipod touch and iphone platforms will outnumber DS sales across all models combined. It wouldn't be surprising if by the end of 2011 total iphone+ipod touch+ipad sales weren't higher then all sales for both the DS and PSP combined over their 6 or 7 year lifetime.
The day of the dedicated handheld console system is over, the day of the mobile phone and mini computer (ipod touch) as the primary gaming platform is well underway whether big N realizes it or not.
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