| Soundwave said:
3DS + Vita according to NPD leaks sold approximately 175k in February 2014. Which indicates that 3DS is down year over year again (it sold 183k last Feb). Assuming Vita sold it's usual pathetic 20k or so, that would put the 3DS at 155k guesstimate. Compartively at this point in last gen, (Feb 2008) DS was selling 588k and the PSP at 243k. That means even the second place PSP is selling way more at the same point in its life than the 3DS + Vita *combined*. That means the handheld business is only about 20% of what it was last gen. Lets go back even further to the GBA generation, the GBA alone was selling 353k for Feb 2004. So it's lagging behind the GBA gen too. This can't really be a content issue either, the 3DS has had a great library of releases with Bravely Default selling well in Feb and Pokemon X/Y out and also the new cheaper 2DS model this year. |
I agree with this, but I don't think it is a doomed, it just got smaller.
The casuals left, the Nintendogs, Brain Age people, the people who bought a Game Boy in the 90s to play Tetris, they left for cell phones. Now handhelds aren't any more casual than a home console. Actually, it is the home of Niche games, turn based strategy, dungeon crawlers, japanese rpgs, you have the high budget games in home consoles, and the low budget ones in handhelds.
150 million sales are not possible anymore. But we are left with something that will still sell quite a lot more than Super Nintendo. Even if 3DS sells only 65 million units, that is a nice userbase to sell software to. And in software sales, the 3DS is still selling more every year.
Nintendo still owes us a 2D Metroid, a Wario Land platformer, a third Pokemon, an Advance Wars game, and I hope Konami makes another Metroidvania Castlevania.
