Soundwave said:
Game Boy Advance would've sold well above 100 million units had it not been ended prematurely.
Dude, we've been over this how many times already? You know exactly what I'm going to say about the GBA situation, and you're just going to continue dismissing what I have to say.
Besides I mean regardless of reason where did all those 236 million DS + PSP owners go? Did 150 million of them just evaporate? Did they stop playing games or are a good portion of them content with their phones/tablets today? If that's the case then, it is very much at the heart of the issue.
First off, 236 million is an absolute upper limit that assumes no overlap between DS and PSP owners and that nobody who bought one model of either never bought a later model (e.g., someone who bought both a DS Lite and a DSi). Of course, even if we did assume that, say, there were 200 million handheld owners last gen, then the question isn't just "Where did they go?", but also "Where did they come from?" So where did they come from (Cotton-eye Joe)? It's probably safe to say that those who would not have typically bought a handheld were at least partially responsible for the mind-bogglingly huge sales of the DS. The massive spike in sales following the DS Lite just seems totally inexplicable. Then again, it's entirely possible that any periphery demographic was largely inconsequential as the system sold what it did to "regular" gamers on its own merits. We really don't know. The PSP, meanwhile, comes across as a more "hardcore" handheld and probably drew in lots of people on the basis of the PlayStation brand name.
This generation things were a little different. The Vita in particular was bungled by Sony. Not only was the system poorly marketed, when factoring in hidden costs (mainly memory cards), the Vita was one of the most expensive handhelds ever even in inflation-adjusted terms. It's been argued that the Vita was simply too powerful for its own good, its high price the result of high power, and this caused a "death spiral" of sorts, with the poor early sales discouraging developers from making games for the system (and dev costs were obviously higher), which in turn further discouraged consumers from buying in, which in turn discouraged developers even more, etc., etc. The system has done semi-decently in Japan, but has bombed horribly in the West, especially the U.S.
The 3DS also had marketing and pricing issues. Like the Wii U, the 3DS was launched in a period when Nintendo's marketing department was sitting on its ass. Also, the 3DS had a sticker price well in excess of any previous Nintendo handheld, and even with inflation factored in it was still by far the most expensive Nintendo handheld. The 3DS did improve after a price cut, but history has shown that poor early momentum is very hard to fully recover from. That being said, the 3DS is far from a sales failure, and after correcting for the fact that the U.S. saw disproportionately huge handheld sales growth beginning with the GBC and extending through the GBA era, as well as the abnormally huge sales of the DS in all regions, from a historical standpoint the 3DS is doing fairly well.
The gen-over-gen sales decline in the handheld market can be largely blamed on endogenous factors. The Vita's failure is entirely explicable due to mistakes Sony made, and now we're back to a handheld market with only one relevant system, just like it was prior to the PSP. As for the 3DS, it only looks bad because of the DS and because of the GBA's U.S. performance, as I've explained before. It's been doing very well in Japan and fairly decent in Europe. While there would have been a gen-over-gen dip even if the 3DS did as well as the GBA in the U.S., and some of the gen-over-gen dip is possibly due to some periphery demographic that entered and exited the dedicated gaming handheld market, much if not most of the decline is likely due to those aforementioned endogenous factors. Aside from the fact that a single company has dominated the market for over a quarter of a century, handhelds are no different from their bigger console counterparts. They succeed and fail due to things like pricing, games, marketing, regional variations in buying habits. There's no need to blame everything on external factors.
And that's all I have to say about the subject.
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