Just for the record, the original DS sold 7m in its second best year in Japan, and 8.2m in its best year in Japan. 3DS is at 4.9m or so in the past 12 months - which is as high as any console has ever sold in a year in Japan (seriously, PS2 / Wii / SNES topped out at 4m-4.5m in 12 months, PS1 topped out at 5m in 12 months) but still way off the DS peak. Will be interesting to see how high 3DS gets though - I'm sure they can push it to at least 6m in a year (a 12 month year, not say Jan-Dec necessarily).
Hardware is tracking around 60k down on 2011 through week one of May in Japan, but presumably Wii U / Vita / 3DS will come through and lead to a substantially bigger year than 2011 by year end.
Japan is like the mirror image of the West right now too - total Sony & Microsoft HW are down quite a bit on 2011 YTD (1.176m in 2012, 1.398m in 2011 through tis point, X360 (-50% YTD), PSP (-57% YTD) are most of the fall, PS3 is up a bit, Vita is up from 0), while Nintendo HW is up marginally (50k) even with DS collapsing due to saturation / 3DS.
People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.
When there are more laws, there are more criminals.
- Lao Tzu
