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We still have a few months left in the year so first year sales shouldn't be calculated yet. The GBA was also phenominally successful, and I think that the DS does not have to meet those numbers to be classified an unqualified success.

Those are a couple of good links, but the comments were made before and as the DS was introduced. I think between E3 2004 and November 21, 2004 Iwata and the brass at Nintendo became much more confident in their vision. Iwata has been talking about the stagnation of the industry for a while, but his vision had not had the oppertunity to show its merit in sales. I'm sure, after the luke warm reception of previous controversial visions like the Wind Waker, he was unsure of the DS's appeal.

I think Nintendo's former president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, shed a lot of light on this subject with this comment:

"If we are unsuccessful with the Nintendo DS, we may not go bankrupt, but we will be crushed."

I've always felt like Nintendo thought the DS was an idea should succeed, but they were worried that the idea was to idealistic for the industry.

Nintendo may have stumbled upon a recipe for success with the DS, and it may not have worked without a combination of things. I'm sure the backwards compatibility, production capacity, innovative controls, ease of development, copious demo units, price, and games all have played a role. However, from about Oct 2004 onward, Nintendo has held their heads high and have become much more confident.

It's almost like Iwata said, "Fuck it. If we go down, we will do it our way." Then was suddenly vindicated. I wasn't talking about what Nintendo thought initally. Now it appears that they are looking to the DS as real staple.

I don't believe this is true. I can't remember a single piece of hardware that Nintendo has pushed harder. From launch to selling world-wide in under 4 months? That hasn't happened from the big N.

Were it not for the GBA compatibility feature, I bet the DS wouldn't have been the huge success it is. The games are great, yes, but there are big gaps between them and look at how the PSP is hurting from a situation like that.

By the way, the DS is a success but it hasn't sold as well as the flagship GBA line. Look at the sales figures, the first GBA sold 12 million in the first year (67 million in 4 years), and the DS is well under 7 million for the first year. Both the GBA and the GCN were launched in several markets in a relatively short timeframe.

Furthermore, Nintendo does regard it as experimental (perhaps I emphasized it too much, I'd agree that "just" may not have been the best way to put it) and it goes as far as to call it "Nintendo's Third Pillar" along with the GBA and the GCN. Here's an interesting interview about the new paradigm and an article with Nintendo's president claiming the DS may not be a big seller.

Meanwhile Microsoft continues to lag way behind. Not a single game for the console ranked in the top 100 sales chart for the first half of 2005 - just like 2004. Fable sold the most with 12,090 copies, but this was no where near the 100th place in the chart (Rockman Zero 4 for the GBA, which sold 65,341 copies). Embarrasingly, the best-selling game for the PSOne (a reissue of Valkyrie Profile) still sold double the volume of Fable.

Happily, Nintendo were the top publisher, shipping a total of 3,166,103 games. The company also had the biggest number of games - 17 - in the top 100. Sony Computer Entertainment was in second with around a million less games, followed by Namco in third, while Square Enix and Bandai rounded out the top five publishers

I searched on google news, and I found a few different sources:
Advanced Media Network, GameCube Europe, Gamesradar.com.

If you go through the sources, you'll see that AMN's source is GameCube Europe. GameCube Europe's sources is Aussie-Nintendo. Gamesradar says that its info came from Australian internet reports, and it gives a quote that is directly from Aussie-Nintendo, so it's fairly safe to assume that Aussie-Nintendo is their source too. If I had to take a wild guess where this started, I'd say it started there.

Aussie-Nintendo says that they got this info by emailing Nintendo of America. This could definitely be a hoax. If it was official word from Nintendo, wouldn't they have a press release rather than just emailing some random guy?

However, a Nintendo representative could have released that information without knowing that it was a secret, or this could be Nintendo trying to build up hype. It's too late to know for sure, but we definitely don't know for certain whether this is the truth or just a hoax. Right now it's pretty much just internet rumours.

Here

Not 2:1 in totals, but in weekly sales, it was until the last week of March.

Those numbers are sales in Japan as of the end of March. The PSP has 623k sold this year, DS has 485k. In the last week of March, the DS had 55k and the PSP had 43k, but the week before, the DS only had 22k. I saw numbers from before that that were pretty much the same.

The jump was because the new colors came out that week. I'm not sure if it's managed to hang onto those numbers or not. The site they link to as their source doesn't seem to have detailed hardware sales up right now, but they do have % shares of total hardware sales. The DS is at 30%, the PSP is only 24%, so it looks like they have at least partially.

Too soon to say where it'll go.

The Play Yan media player, which allows music and movie playback on the GBA and DS, launched in Japan yesterday. Along with it, Nintendo opened a new section of their Play Yan site.

For your pleasure and amusement "Garage Games" are downloadable for the device, which can be saved to a Panasonic SD card via your PC. The first game available is Insect, and a new game will be unveiled each week until the twelve games are available. Upcoming games include BAT, which is a baseball-based game. A thirteenth game is available to Japanese Club Nintendo members only.

The download is around 650kb, and plays in a thumbnail sized area of your screen, where files are normally displayed.

Maybe with somthing like this?

so the DS presales are outselling the redesigned PS2 presales. perhaps that's because everyone already owns the PS2 and would prefer to pre-order something totally new over something that's just an update? (at least among first adopters.) here's the article that has the statistics. (can't seem to find the original gamespot story that is referred to)

I love the fact that the GBA, which already has an update to it, is selling at about 3 times the rate of the XBOX. I wonder where the IQue would fit on this list...

I think a just as interesting, if not more interesting story is the fact that a Gamecube + Mario Kart bundle will be coming out this holiday season for only $99.99. That's the same price just the console is selling for now.

Voice recognition... like Mario Party 6? Or, a bit farther back, Hey You, Pikachu?

"At first i thought the GBA SP would still reign over the PSP for me, but after seeing this, i'm not so sure."

I wouldn't judge based on graphical quality. Problem #1 is you're seeing a video from a shakey cam, as opposed to the direct-to-video demos we've seen from Nintendo. Problem #2 is that Nintendo's changed the playing field somewhat. Even if the PSP can run circles around the DS in terms of graphical capabilities, there's still the interface to consider. The stylus interface for the DS kicks ass.

I encourage you to watch this video here:

http://www.cube-europe.com/news.php?nid=6748

These are mostly technical demos, but watch the whole way through. I guarantee you you'll be seeing stuff you just won't possibly be able to do with the PSP. Read between the lines a bit, and it gets more exciting. Notice the handwriting-based IM program they have running on this demo. That, in and of itself, isn't so exciting. However, think about using this bad boy on an 802.11 connection. Not only would it be easy to get this thing on the net to play against other people, but you'd have a suitable interface for setting up your character and even having some in-game chats. All on a seperate screen, no less.

Yes, I'm a Nintendo fan boy, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But man, I do get excited at the idea of playing on-line from my recliner. Assuming the PSP has 802.11 as the rumors suggest, it seems so pale in comparison.

Processor:

• There are unreadably small words between "Cache:" and "8Kb", as well as "TCM:" and "32Kb" which have been ignored by the translation. They probably refer to two separate types of cache under each category.

Memory:

• Main memory: 8MB on debugging version (developer model?)

LCD:

• Colour: R:G:B = 6:6:6 (referring perhaps to 6 bits of information for each color channel per pixel?)

Sound:

• Up to 8 channels may be assigned for PSG. (I don't know what that is. Anyone?)

Input Device:

• "Cross", a translation of "juu-ji kii", refers to what is commonly known as a direction-pad (similar to the four-way controller on most Nintendo gamepads)

Electric Power Control:

• Wake-up can also be timed.
• The "uknown" engine is the geometry engine.

MS has already said that Xbox2 will NOT be backwards compatible.

While I only happen to own Nintendo consoles, I don't have much experience with backwards compatability (except for a few old gameboy puzzle games and Mario Tennis which I still play on the GBA), I do have experience with the "ultimate" backwards-compatible machine... the PC. I fire up Civ II, Warcraft II, old King's Quests and Lucasarts games at least once a year.

Backwards compatability rules. PS3 is already announced to be backwards compatible, and Iwata-San has already confirmed in an interview with Famatsu that N5 will backwards compatable too. Big mistake (IMO) Bill...

Is that why the GameCube version of SCII sold more than the Xbox and PS2 versions?

Yeah, kids like to beat things, but it's not drums that will make this game popular: "Beat Off with DK! - Donkey Konga HANDS ON!!"

You deserve your nick. Seriously.

Right now, I can change resolutions. On the fly. Without being root.

How about I complain about the problem that windows has had since its latest version. It crashed. All the time. At least my OS works reliably.

and, re: your sig about gamecube's dying, well, I just bought one. Sales are up. and your sig references an article in april. see here. It says, specifically, "the Nintendo GameCube has now officially reached No. 1 -- it's America's top-selling home video game console, according to direct sales data from the nation's leading retailers." Half a million systems. Man, you are permanently -1, troll in my book.

Gamecube Europe has a trailer (in Quicktime) of the game. No need to register.

ACTUALLY, according to this link, Nintendo is going to be dropping the US price of the Gamecube to $99 by the end of September. Unfortunately, the only other place I found the info was here and there's no linkage in that "viewer mail" section to get more details. Nintendo's website was similarly not helpful at all.

Assuming the above is true, it was probably at the end of last week's news cycle and we'll probably hear more tomorrow.

Searching for an answer to your question, I ran across TerrForge. They have a cross-platform gaming solution, not only for Macintosh and PC, but also for console to computer. Read more here

Wow.

This is amazing news. There's no reason why Sony can't capture the pocket videogame market. Nintendo is entrenched, but thats exactly where they were with the SNES; we all saw what happened there with the launch of the playstation.

If anything, Nintendo is wiser now. They now know that being the first to introduce a technology can make or break a platform.

Will the cart-based gameboy SP be able to compare with 1.8GB disc Sony alternative? Will Nintendo ditch the newly released SP in favor of something disc-based? Should be fun to watch.

www.cube-europe.com/news/10198973416591.html

This sound bite is the best:

When interviewing Nintendo's U.S president Minoru Arakawa, he let slip that Nintendo 'weren't sure what to think when Microsoft made the offer.'' He continued with the commments "I was surprised, we didn't need the money. I thought it was a joke."

sums it up nicely for me