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JWeinCom on 02 April 2013
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Don't worry. It's just the circle of doom...

Way back when we talked about the doom of the DS. It wasn't selling well and I believe was being outsold by the GBA in some weeks. It had no games, noone cared about touch controls, the graphically superior PSP would crush it, etc. Then the DS took off, so we all conveniently forgot about how almost everyone who didn't work for Nintendo was talking about how doomed it was.

The Wii was also going to suck. Its graphics sucks, its controls were nothing more than a gimmick, and Wii Sports was one of the least exciting launch games of all time. The PS3 was going to crush it (and the 360). But, the Wii was successful so, we moved on.

Now the PS3 was the target. Looking back, it's easy to see that worldwide the PS3 was pretty competitive with the X-Box 360, but we needed a target for our doom so the PS3 was it (not to mention Sony's executives made it an easy target. Show me a picture of a PS3 on store shelves and get 50 bucks!) Eventually, the PS3 got on solid ground. Next up!

The 3DS was surely a doomed from the start. Nobody cares about 3D, and the Vita has a 4 core processor. That's 4 FREAKING CORES! And when the 3DS didn't burst out of the gate like the DS uhhhhhh didn't, everyone was like HAH SEE?! SMARTPHONES HAVE TAKEN OVER AND THE 3DS IS DOOMED! There were even lots of people speculating that a pricecut would only delay the demise of the 3DS by a few months. Whether or not the 3DS will exceed the DS is yet to be seen, but it is staying quite competitive with its predecessor's pace and with its lineup this year, the odds are that the 3DS will keep up till the end of the year.

Sony fans are reveling in the Wii U situation because up until just a few months ago, the Vita was the doomed system of the day. Getting outsold by up to 8:1 in given weeks by the 3DS, things looked grim. We'd probably still be beating up on the poor Vita if not for the Wii U. It's hard to say yet if the Vita will be alright, but a price cut and new software has seemingly set it on the right course in Japan, which is probably the most important region for the device.

Now we come to the Wii U, which had a comparable launch to the PS3 and 360, and then didn't see a software release till last week (which boosted sales quite nicely). If you're sick of it, don't worry too much. It's only a matter of a few months till we see some nice software that will put an end to this, and all the doom threads will only make the "I told you so" when we get May's NPD data all the more entertaining. And rest assured, that by the end of the year we'll be onto mocking the PS4 or X-Box 720, or perhaps both!