Screen Digest: 112 million Nintendo DS Units and 67 million PSPs to be sold

[JDWolf36]

Interesting data but don't know if they really account for the bandwagon effect you see with consoles essentially once it becomes clear there is a winner and the software you want will be heading there in consoles you see the other consoles largely being ignored look at PS1 compared to N64 early on in their life and later on. After about two years the PS1 had a similar lead to what the DS has on the PSP right now but as time went on and it became more obvious which system would win the generation you saw more and more people moving to so that a gap of 16 million in March of 1998 was 31 million by March of 1999 and 43 million by March of 2000.

That is to a degree a problem I see with this analysis it assumes a linear growth pattern for the DS but does not for the PSP the PSP by their numbers grows to 67 million in 3.5 years while selling about 450k a month right now and with fairly stable sales so if these were to continue for 3.5 years you would see the PSP gaining about 19 million in sales moving from its current 21 million to 40 million apply the same to the DS you have the DS selling about 1.5 million per month and over 3.5 years this would produce about 63 million current 44 million in sales you do get fairly close to their 112 million figure with 107 million much closer than the PSP with 67 million compared to 40 million. Now the reason I think this is a problem is it predicts the market leader to stay stable while assuming the 2nd place portable will actually gain speed with no evidence of increasing sales they are assuming the PSP will on average increase from its current sales of 450k a month to a little over 1 million in the next 3.5 years despite any type of bandwagon effect due to games and simple word of mouth.

Not trying to be pessimistic to the PSP here it just seem that if one of the systems was going to double its selling speed its much more likely the system that still has supply constraints due to demand will be the one doing it as opposed to the portable that is barely making its quarterly numbers from a year ago and is down 5.2%.