| thismeintiel said: Well, I'm going to say it is pratically impossible. There is no way that Nntendo is going to sell ~3.7M more DSs before the end of 2014, when Nintendo will most likely disontinue it, if not earlier. At most, they are probably looking 1.5M-1.8M, if it isn't discontinued earlier. As for the shipped vs. sold argument, it's irrelevant. This is going to be based on shipment numbers, the only hard numbers we have, not speculated sold sales. Besides, this late in their lifcycles, the PS2 will have ~250K on shelves, while the DS will probably have ~500K on shelves. Those shipped numbers will eventually become sold, anyway. |
The DS sold 2.15 million units in the last nine months of 2012. How do you figure that it will sell only 1.8 million in the next two years?
Let's restrict attention to the Americas. April-December 2011, it sold 2.35 million units. April-December 2012, it sold 1.92 million units. At that trend, it would sell over 1.5 million units April-December 2013 alone. Also keep in mind that the DS numbers include DSi (which does count as DS, because there wasn't really any new software that was DSi-only, not counting downloadable software).
The GBA kept selling well into the life of the DS. There's no reason to assume that the DS will work differently from here on.
Note that the low expected shipping numbers for January-March are likely to be due to shipments happening in December, rather than because of slow sales in January-March. Even at the current sales rate of 25,000 per week (the DS sold more than that in some earlier weeks), in the 13 weeks of the quarter, they'd sell over 300,000 units... but the shipment prediction is just 150,000. Indeed, in the three weeks that lie fully within 2013 so far, the system has sold over 90,000... it's going to sell more than 60,000 more in the next nine weeks.
Anyway, just a bit of food for thought, that last bit.
