| Aielyn said:
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. |
The GBA shipped 4.34 million in the 3rd fiscal year of DS availability. The DS is forecasted to ship 2.3 million in the 3rd FY of the 3DS. The GBA only managed another 2.05 million in the next three FY's. If the DS follows that trend, it will only ship another 1.09 million units in its lifetime. If it drops off like the GBA did in America (3M out of that 4.34, then only 540k out of the 2.05M.) it would only see another 414k after this fiscal year.
Like you said..."There's no reason to assume that the DS will work differently from here on."
It's very unlikely the weekly DS sales on VGC are accurate. For one, it still has DS sales over shipments. Two, we know Nintendo only shipped 30k outside of the Americas last quarter, yet VGC has the DS selling almost 700k outside the US since September. Three, we know DS sales peaked at less than 17k in Europe over the holidays, yet somehow it is selling at about half that in mid January when everything else is down ~85%.
