Barkley said:
Well the GBA has the excuse of being succeeded by the DS a mere 3 years after launching, and it still only just lost to the 3DS. The Gameboy is surprising though. |
That's becoming tiring... FAT DS replaced it in the end of 2004, GBA had been launched in March 2001! Fat ds wasn't a hot thing, it didn't affect gba hardware sales almost at all, despite the bc, as for software sales the bc helped them, Nintendo was launching a considerable amount of gba software till the beginning of 2008.
The cheaper Ds lite was what that killed gba in 2006, fat sold just 19m between 2004-2006...
3DS is anywise stronger than GBA in software, in spite of having less third party support overall ( in Japan 3ds probably has more third party support than gba had, hence their very big sales discrepancy )... Compare X/Y to R/S and Mario kart 7 to Mario kart SC for instance....
As for gameboy, the problem is the combination of GB and GBC sales, never forget that game boy color came nine years after gb ( it lasted almost 5 years, Nintendo shipped 2.1m gbc software in 2003 ! ) and had its own brand new vast game library, for example Pokemon silver and gold were gbc exclusives, as many other major games!
In addition, It's true that home console players buy more software, but the attach ratio for handheld console is also lower, because more handheld console players own more than one system of the console family than home console players, since it's more affordable to upgrade/purchase a revision, even though home console are less durable products...
