Nintendo 3DS: The Failed Launch

[Tizona]

RolStoppable said:

Tizona said:

Not to beat a dead horse, but I did a little research this morning on some of my points.

The Gameboy Advance was released in 2001 as well as the Gamecube. According to the chartz, the GBA alone (standard and SP model) sold 81.49m units while the Gamecube sold only 21.75m. Even with taking out the GBA:SP's 43.57m units, the GBA, a 6th gen handheld, handily beat it's 6th gen console counterpart in sales. The original GB has so many iterations and such a long life, I couldn't really find a good way to seperate it against individual generations.

Second, as far as a system needing to beat it's predessesor in order to be a success, they only problem with this is that sometimes outside forces make this nearly impossible, but not because of any shortcomings on the systems side. For instance, the SuperNintendo did not outsell the NES, but that can easily be due to the emergence of real competiton in the Genesis. To that same point, if/when the 3DS does not sell as much as the DS, it could be argued that the rise of mobile/iphone gaming(the Iphone was released 3 years after the DS), and Sony releasing their sophmore handheld (which hopefully they learned from past mistake and will be a very real competitor), could be just as big of factors as the 3DS hardware itself. Thoughts?

That's not how the comparison should be made. You aren't supposed to compare products of the same company, but rather pit the winning systems of each generation against it each other. Therefore it isn't the Gamecube that gets compared to the GBA, but the PS2. The GC vs. GBA comparison just illustrates how big of a failure the GC really was, because there were tens of millions who were willing to buy Nintendo systems, but in the case of the GC chose not to. This ties in with the second point.

If the industry keeps growing overall, but one company does not, then that is failure for the company that declined. More people than ever are buying hardware that plays games, but a company can't benefit from this? That's a sure sign that the company in question did something wrong and keep in mind that no company sets out with the goal of selling less than they previously did. So pretty much all the shortcomings can be traced back to the system itself and not some outside factors. Blaming something or someone else is just done to deflect from one's own failure.

Ok. I guess I was arguing something different than you on the handheld/console sales side. I was pretty much just looking at nintnedo systems vs themselves, not other companies.

I don't like the sentiment that I can't defend or at least point out other factors that could be a part of the "slow" sales of the 3DS without it being labled blame. I'm not blaming, I don't think, but pointing out that there are multiple market factors that effect a products sales.

I'm excited to see how it all plays out. I'm not a blind fanboy, and I see your arguments and think they are very sound.I just think we have a different view on what a failure is.