I thought this was a remarkable outcome for the year which hasn't gotten much discussion. 2009 was the DS's fifth year on the market, a year of world economic decline, and yet it managed to sell 30 million consoles. It was just under 2008's performance, effectively flat in it's fifth year.

Haven't all majorly successful consoles before peaked in their third years and declined in their fourth (with slow declines for consoles like PS2)? For the DS, not only has it's sales pace far outdone everything else, but it's peaked much later as well.

Is the conventional wisdom that a console can't be expected to peak after it's third year wrong? And considering the degree by which the PS2 is being outpaced, and how long it took for the DS to peak, and how flat it was in it's following year, could 200 million be a very low end for DS lifetime sales?

No, PS1 peaked in it's 4th or 5th year iirc. Then again, PS1 had a relatively slow start, and only really took off it's 3rd year.

I wouldn't know.I'm just commenting so dat ur thread will stay on the home page & others will post so I can come back & read their thoughts.

Just amazingness!

Remember DS had a luke-warm start too, it didn't take off amazingly, even the PSP was ahead of it at the beginning whe nall of a sudden DS is more than double it's sales! Nintendo has really expanded the market, and I expect DS sales to hit 200 Million sometime in 2015. 250 Million is even possible if some miracle happened, that would happen in 2017- 2019.

Very true, but the DS still makes older handhelds look pathetic in sales. Only when you combine Gameboys with Gameboy Color, which is a more significant difference than those between DS models, do you have anything that compares to DS. Undoubtedly DS will vastly outsell those two combined by the end of it's life unless it's cut short by it's successor.

Gameboy had much less appeal to adults though.

DS was a slow burn compared to GBA, but after Nintendogs hit it was consistently ahead of PSP (about 6-9 months), and when the Lite/NSMB/Brain-Age combo landed, it shot into the stratosphere of PS2 killing territory (about 18 months).

PS1 had a much slower start (it really didn't take off until mid/late 1997) as did NES/Famicom (same thing, around 1987/88 is when it really went crazy), but DS did have a slower start than the other huge selling systems (SNES, PS2, GBA, Wii).  It's probably most comparable to the original GB.

Yeah much less appeal to adults the gameboy had, that's when I think DSi XL could be the total opposite of that, many many adults will buy the DSi XL.  If it's a big hit and has great legs then I can see DS easily topping 145 Million therefore topping PS2 before 1st January 2011.

People always say that, but in it's first year DS had a much stronger launch than PSP, and it was outselling it most of the time. It went on to have a stronger holiday than PSP. The PSP had a couple of spikes where it sold fantastically (big game releases) and outsold DS by a small amount for the following weeks.

http://vgchartz.com/hwlaunch.php?cons1=DS&reg1=All&cons2=PSP&reg2=All&cons3=DS&reg3=All&weeks=60

http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=DS&reg1=All&cons2=PSP&reg2=All&cons3=DS&reg3=All&start=38298&end=38718

Many people (including me) probably remember the DS as starting poorly because the media was so down on it at first. Meanwhile, the PSP was the media darling that was going to destroy Nintendo.