Global Hardware + Software Up (Ending Dec. 1) After Black Friday sales

[mrstickball]

MDMAlliance said:

mrstickball said:

1. Its only out-paced the DS if you are doing non-aligned launches. Go look at the same point in time in 2006 for the DS and now for the 3DS. That is critical to the observation, as the DS continued to see huge yearly gains starting in 2006. Comparatively, the 3DS is down from last year. You can justify this due to the huge price drop, but that should show you how weak the 3DS is - it took a huge price drop and its at ~24m units through November of its 2nd holiday.

2. They're losers this generation because they aren't going to achieve strong results for their owners. If the 3DS and WiiU see their unit sales drop by 50% life to date in comparison to their predecessors, isn't that a huge loss? Only in some crazy world would such a huge cut not be considered a loss. But that has been the core of my argument: the 3DS, Vita and WiiU are going to see less than 50% of the units sold of their predecessors. Regardless if that is PS2>PS3, Wii>WiiU, DS>3DS, or PSP>Vita, its bad news.

3. The reason I mentioned the 150% increase in unit sales is because that's what it'd take to keep up its sales pace with the DS next year. If it doesn't, its going to continue to have a notably slower sales pace vs. the DS. That is not good, and tantamount to my argument about the 3DS.

"Losing and gaining marketshare is normal" - sure, but by how much? If there's a catastrophic loss, its going to hurt a company's profit margins, which will hurt them in the long run. Look at Sega. They had reducing market share from the Genesis through Dreamcast, and it cost them dearly.

My argument about different is that the DS was hugely disruptive in 2004/5. No handheld had anything close to what the DS offered. Capacitive touch screens were barely available for mobile phones, yet the DS had them at a very affordable price. That was hugely beneficial to its success. Comparatively, the 3D nature of the 3DS has done very little in regards to perception of the device - making it little different than its far more prolific competitor, the iPhone or Android systems.

The PS3 is in fact a loser. Its lost Sony billions of dollars. If a system fails to turn a profit for a company, its a loser, is it not?

I think you're only trying to make it a loser as much as you can, because you keep twisting your own words and definitions.  You don't know if the 3DS will sell less than half as much as the DS.  

Also, we haven't quite finished up the year yet, so it wont be down as much as you're claiming it will be.  The DS' best years were NOT its first two years, but somewhere in the middle.  This applies to most consoles, and sales for the 3DS may not have been particularly strong for the reason that North America didn't sell as many as expected (due to a lack of software).  This, however, seems to be different considering what we already know for the line-up for 2013.  

Where did I twist my definition of what a loser was or is?

The 3DS will have a lot less market share and market to cater to, as I believe it will sell about 50% of the hardware, life to date. I've been saying this well prior to the 3DS even coming out, as I believed mobiles will take away a lot of users that would traditionally buy a handheld console. And given the market, this has been the case as many publishers are making a further transition to multi-platform development, and will eventually release more exclusives to mobile, depriving the 3DS of major 3rd party hardware, which it needs to help it to strong sales, as the 3DS has nothing close to a killer app yet (and given the future lineup is unlikely to have, as all titles you've mentioned are almost all sequels to IPs already on the DS/3DS).