Shadow1980 said:
It was the DS Lite that caused DS sales to explode, not NSMB, which came out the previous month in the U.S. and did nothing for sales. In Japan, NSMB was released a number of weeks after the DS Lite. The Lite clearly was the primary driver of sales growth in Japan as well, and while NSMB did provide an additional boost, it was only for like a week or two. If you're going to assert "the Switch is pretty much throwing every past historical pattern out the window at this point," well, I invite you to provide your evidence that it totally subverting all the "rules of sales." Be specific, and cite specific data points. As for the Game Boy, the late 90s spike was because of the Game Boy Color, which, while technically and officially an upgraded Game Boy, was treated as an entirely new system by the market. While I have never been able to find monthly data for the Game Boy in the U.S., I was able to get hold of yearly sales data some years back (might have been from GAF), and while the Game Boy sold 2.9M units in 1998, up from 2.1M in 1997, most if not all of that came from the Color, which NPD tracked separately, and they had it at ~990k for 1998. The GBC was released in November 1998, two months after Pokemon R&B. It wasn't until 1999 that the full effects of the GBC were felt, with the Game Boy selling 7.2M units that year, nearly 90% of which was from the Color. Without more granular (i.e., monthly) sales data, we cannot tell for sure what happened in 1998. Pokemon was a brand new and unproven franchise in the U.S., so it may not have been an immediate system-seller. We don't know what it sold in September (the month Pokemon came out) or in November (the month the Color came out), or for the rest of months of that year, for that matter. Hell, we don't even know exactly how many copies Pokemon sold that year. But we do know that new hardware models often have major stimulative effects on hardware sales, and when they do it always far outstrips the ability of individual games to move hardware. Pokemon R&G came out in Japan in 1996, but because of the lack of sales data we cannot determine what effects it had when it was released. But the GB Color did provide a boost to Game Boy sales, which suggests that the Color, being a new and qualitatively better model, was also the primary booster of sales in the U.S. |
Wrong Again. You can trace the DS explode because of Super Marios Bros. Ds. The videogame is only a box to play a videogame. With the use of historical background, ignoring context background, like you like to do you can trace great games in consoles with serious problems. A videogame about the software, not the hardware, if you statement is true, powerful consoles awalys wins. Nintendo lack of feature with Wii, and win the 7th generation because of software output and not hardware features. DS lack of tons of features compared with PSP, but when New Super Marios Bros. launched the sales exploded.
