| the_dengle said: Your 3DS sales analysis is laughable at best. I hope you have the good grace to feel silly about it this time next year. The 3DS's 'stalling' YOY sales are the result of three things, and only three things. The first thing is software. Of course the 3DS sold better last Nov/Dec than it did this past Holiday season. Do you see the difference in releases?? In 2011 the console got a new 3D Mario (first ever original one on a handheld), a new Mario Kart, and the first ever Monster Hunter on a Nintendo handheld. This year it got... Paper Mario, Professor Layton... Animal Crossing in Japan helped it just about keep pace in that region alone, but Europe and America didn't stand a chance. The second thing is software. It's VERY telling that Nintendo's biggest release last year across all platforms was a DS game. Not a 3DS game... a DS game. The DS was an absolute powerhouse, right to the end. And you can rest assured that it is now finally, mercifully, the end. The 3DS's biggest competition last year was its predecessor. It won't have that problem this year. The final thing is (surprise, surprise!) software. Notice that both of the previous two issues the 3DS had last year are already put to rest for this year. Don't worry about Nintendo having a Holiday release that can drive console sales: Pokémon is coming. Don't worry about the 3DS being upstaged by another console in the software department: Pokémon is coming. It only takes a glance at the 3DS's software lineup for 2013 to see that the console is going to do quite well this year... very well, in fact. But I'm sure right after hitting 50 million LTD sales in under 3 years, the platform will immediately divebomb into doom territory, eh? |
Uhm, forgive me if this may seem a tad in poor taste, but didn't the Wii do something similar? People were going on and on about how "Oh, so you're saying that the sales will suddenly stop?! Lol, that's ridiculous!", when what a lot of people actually thought was that it would have a very steep decline after an early sales peak and historic rise, this gross polarization gets you nowhere (the same crowd laughed at the notion of a DS successor as early as it came, yet some of us believed it not only possible, but likely).
The 3DS won't divebomb, not exactly, much like the Wii, but could well be headed for a similar decline. Its more or less directly in the path of the "new world" in gaming (i.e; tablets and smartphones). I have said this many times in the past 2-3 years and I will repeat once more; dedicated handheld devices are going away for good.
