Yakuzaice said:
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%. |
To add to your post, the reason the GBA did so well after the DS was launched is because it was just over 3 years old when the DS launched. The DS was over 6 years old when the 3DS was launched, so its drop off is going to be much quicker. My 1.5M-1.8M may end up being a very optimistic prediction.