Never liked aligned launches. It's misleading.

I mean lets say both console A and B sell the same amount in their first year.

Console A launches in all 3 regions same day and sells out. It sells 1 million total.
Console B launches in all 3 regions seperately. The console manufacturer obviously allocates more consoles to the region it is launching in, so instead of say 333k per region week 1 in each region, it gets 750k in each region on its launch week, or the first to launch even a million cause they allocate all consoles there.

But what does it look like Aligning launches?
Console A. 333k US, 333k Japan, 333k Europe
Console B. 1m US. 750k Japan, 750k Europe

Aligning launches makes console B look like it is destroying console A, yet as I said in the beginning, both consoles in 1 year sold eactly the same. 12 million consoles. They sold the same each week as well. It's just due to allocated to plan for launch demand, the one console just decimates the other when ALLIGNING launches.

and just doing simple math, again lets say they sell the same every week. If console B launches in region 2 a month later than region 1, that means aligning launches, it will have technically a whole month of extra sales over Console A. When region 3 launches, it will again have more free sales over Console A. It's unfair comparison.

They will catch up to each other eventually. It's not for the sake of seeing who's destroying who - it's more about how a console progress throughout the year. It's much more visually pleasing than to leave blank positions. What counts is the total at the end of the year, and right now we can already see how it fares for each of the manufacturer.

Yes, the DS went boom with the release of the DS lite, before that the race between the psp and the DS was actually close. After lite, the just sky rocket it the hell out of it

2006 is quite possibly Nintendo's most important year, despite peaking between 08/09. Wii and DS Lite launched, and they were on fire.

It was the year when Nintendo stopped doing everything wrong, and started doing everything very very right.

I think what was really great about the Wii and DS Lite were the incredibly sleek looks they had, while this seems like a very trivial thing on the surface, it's what made the console look sexy to a lot of people. Most gamers are fairly shallow in that way, they don't want an ugly Gamecube or ugly N64 cartridges (the N64 console itself was nice looking, but not the cartridges or controllers), they wanted hot looking DS Lite and Wiis. Also, a large reason why the PS3 was so much less successful than its predecessor wasn't just the price, it's that the console was kind of ugly.

On top of that, both DS and Wii platforms, along with their sexiness, also offered new and very fresh experiences to the videogame market place. It was Nintendo at their finest, and unlike the similarly fresh NES launch, the Wii and DS Lite managed to have far greater penetration in Europe. NES was late getting off in Europe largely due to the fact that the Commodore generation was still going very strong until the end of the 80s.

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