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Soundwave on 09 May 2015
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Shadow1980 said:
Soundwave said:


That's all fine and good but explain the 3DS being 14 million behind the GBA too at the same point in its life cycle. 


Overinflated sales in the Americas. As I mentioned earlier, for whatever reason (probably a combination of the Golden Era of the Pokemon craze and the fact that it had the lowest inflation-adjusted launch price of any handheld), the GBA was on fire in the U.S., selling almost as much as Europe and Japan combined. It pulled more sales in five years in the U.S. than the original Game Boy did in ten across the whole region (that includes Canada, Latin America, and the Carribean). Relative to other Nintendo handhelds, the GBA wasn't anywhere near as popular outside of America. If you take the Americas out of the equation, the 3DS fares very well against the 3DS. Anomalous activity—the bizarrely high GBA sales in the U.S. or the DS having ungodly high sales everywhere or the PS2's insanely good sales legs post-PS3 or the Wii ending up being a huge success against all expectations—should never be considered "the new normal" without some really damn good reasoning.


The thing is you can't really pick and choose things like this ... you could say the GBA's success was even more impressive because it came before Japan really started to replace their console usage with handhelds. 

GBA sales weren't "bizarrely" high really anyway. They were in line with the GBC yearly sales. DS had a bit of a slow launch, but it then took off too. 

GBC, GBA, and DS all pulled their weight of yearly shipments in the 14-15 million range (DS obviously went well beyond that at its peak). The 3DS is where we start seeing first real declines in Nintendo's yearly handhelds/sold average for the first time since the mid-1990s when the original Game Boy was fizzling out (pre-Pokemon) and Nintendo slapped together the Virtual Boy to try and placate that. 

The other disturbing thing about the 3DS is that it didn't really gain any further sales traction even with better releases over time and more model revisions, like a normal sales cycle (ie: release of Pokemon, new revisions, etc.). It basically peaked its first full year on market and has been declining every year since, which indicates something (read: smartphones) have attached themselves like an anchor to the 3DS' foot and is slowly but surely causing it to sink. 

All that said, Nintendo can't afford to have handheld shipments sink to 1993-1996 levels ... they had the Super NES back then ... they don't have that today. So that train of logic crashes into that brick wall pretty quick.