Media Create/Famitsu Week ending Jan 18th

[zorg1000]

Kresnik said:

zorg1000 said:

I think New 3DS did what it was supposed to, stop sales from plummeting. Last year, 3DS was down roughly 50% YoY thru the first 3 quarters. 3DS has been close to flat YoY for 4 months now, without the redesign we would still be looking at massive YoY declines. U could argue that it was Monster Hunter+Pokémon+Youkai Watch that prevented it but I would have to assume the fanbase for those games are already firmly on 3DS due to all those series already having huge selling installments on it.

I don't think it was expected that New 3DS was going to cause massive YoY gains so I'm pretty sure it has done it's job thus far.

I suppose that's a fair argument.  I was assuming more that it would've re-ignited sales somewhat combined with the slew of massive software that hit during Q4 2014, but perhaps that was too lofty a goal to aim for.

3DS has actually seen a fairly similar sales pattern to DS in Japan, just on a smaller scale.

DS end of 2005-5.6m (13 months) vs 3DS 2011 (10 months)-4.3m

DS 2006-8.4 million (+50%) vs 3DS 2012-5.5 million (+27%)

DS 2007-7.2 million (-14%) vs 3DS 2013-5.1 million (-7%)

DS 2008-4.2 million (-41%) vs 3DS 2014-3.0 million (-42%)

DS 2009-4.0 million (-6%) vs 3DS 2015-???? (Roughly flat thus far)

DS 2010-2.9 million (-28%) vs 3DS 2016-????

DS 2011-0.6 million (-77%) vs 3DS 2017-????

DS Lite was available for 9 months in 2006 while 3DS XL only for 5 months in 2012 so that partially explains the YoY difference between them in that year but DS in 2007/2008 is very similar to 3DS in 2013/2014 and so far 2009 & 2015 are tracking very similar so it seems that New 3DS has had a very similar affect as DSi.

If this trend continues and the next-handheld releases early 2017 than we can come up with a safe guess for 3DS sales this year and going forward 2015-2.7 million, 2016-1.9 million, 2017-0.4 million. So 3DS should be able to sell roughly 5 million more lifetime.