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10 Million Nintendo DS Units Sold Since Launch
DS Gamer writes "Nintendo has announced that worldwide sales of their twin-screen handheld console the Nintendo DS have reached the 10 million mark since its launch in the United States during late November 2004. The vast majority of sales have been in the United States (4 million) and Japan (5 million) where the DS became the fastest selling games machine of all time. From the Reuters article: 'It is on the upswing of its life cycle," Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo of America's vice president of marketing, told Reuters in a telephone interview. She declined to give a sales forecast but said the Japan-based company would provide additional information during its upcoming quarterly financial report. Kaplan added that Nintendo's seven-week-old Wi-Fi Connection wireless gaming service has had more than 550,000 unique visitors globally.'" Commentary is available on Forbes and Gamespot.
Free, with a game that supports it.
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- E. Debs
Depends where in the world you are. If you're in the US I believe there's free access to be had at any McDonalds. Unlike Xbox Live you don't pay any subscription fee to use the service, the only cost would be your internet connection (unless of course you want to play in McDonalds).
I got a DS for Christmas, and I've been very very happy with it.
When it first came out, I wasn't really interested in it... the dual screens seemed like they were pointless, and I didn't think a touch screen would work well in games.
Well, after playing Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for a few weeks, as well as Mario Kart, Animal Crossing and Nintendogs, I'm sold... Nintendo knew what they were doing. The game developers are really taking advantage of what Nintendo offered them. I never thought having two screens would be so convenient.
And the future looks bright for the DS in the area of upcoming games...
In addition, the number of amazing games for the DS gives me great hope for the Revolution. Nintendo is doing something different again, and the fact that so many developers (not just Nintendo) have embraced the hardware of the DS leads me to believe they'll do the same for the Revolution and its controller.
I got a DS for Christmas, and while the system is great (I've been playing Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time, good game, at least as good as the last Mario and Luigi), I was disappointed that there was no wi-fi connectivity outside of games. I mean, if the games connect to my wireless router and hotspots anyway, how hard would it have been to include a wireless browser in the interface outside of games?
I've heard about people trying to reverse engineer the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection so that this is possible, but I really think they should have included this in the first place. It would have had so many uses.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
definitely free as long as you can pick up the wi-fi. apparently my sister lives near someone (or place) that has wi-fi, my daughter and my niece use it in their house all the time....
Exactly right.
To illustrate, according to this Kotaku story, Microsoft shipped 159,000 Xbox 360's to Japan, but only sold 42,000 of them in the first few days.
Got mine When they first came out, just need to bung your mp3's/Movies onto the flash (CF or SD models). sound quality is a just a little tinny, but no worse than the Ipods.
They also have 32 Megabytes of on-board ram, making these a dream for homebrew.
Its no real suprise to see the DS fly off shelves, a touch screen has been badly needed for handhelds for a long time, and the two screens, once you're used to them, you cant go back to using a single screened handheld again.
I predict the same when the Nintendo Revolution hits the scene.
At WiTendoFi.com we have a growing user base that is a real mix of ages. I run the site and am 24 years old. We have plent of 20+ users there (and 20- of course).
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I almost picked it up until I heard that you could only race, no battle mode over WiFi.
That was definitely a "WTF were they thinking?" moment.
You're right, it's probably less important with console hardware than software. But still, going by sell-through numbers is important. It prevents channel stuffing, for starters. You can stuff the channel (load up retailers with equipment) at the end of quarters so as to bring next quarters sales into this quarter. When you do this, it creates a misleading impression, especially because next quarter's true sales can't even begin until you sell off last quarter's stuffed stock.
Sometimes companies have been known to stuff the channel and take the product back in the next quarter! It's just a scam. Going by sell-through eliminates this.
Additionally note that going by shipped units also makes it possible to do other shenanigans like add new retailers to "increase sales". If you add a new retailer, you can count their shipments to fill inventory as sales, even if the units never sell at all. So you can again manipulate sales numbers, or at least the timing of them.
Additionally, you can update your model to get more sales (shipments). If they announced the new PSP with 802.11g or 15% longer battery life or something, they could make it a new model, and the retailers all have to order the new one to put it on the shelves, even if the old ones never sold. Eventually retailers do get tired of this, but they can do it occasionally to jump up the numbers.
Given that the name of the game in video games is to get an installed base out there to attract developers and make royalties from software sold, all these tricks can make the difference between success and failure for a console and so are likely employed by every company to varying degrees.
So it's great to be able to try to null those tricks out as much as possible. For example, with the Xbox 360 launch in Japan.
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Ah, so on that particular game the PSP is as bad as the DS, then. Which also is WEP (or open) only, 802.11b.
Oh well. Thanks for the warning - I'd been told that the PSP worked just fine with WPA.
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no, that number is exactly the amount that have been sold to consumers. The article doesn't state it, but the Nintendo press release that the article was written from does:
"It's important to note that these strong figures represent Nintendo hand-held units and games that consumers have purchased and are now enjoying at home or wherever they like to play."
seems like a nice little jab to Sony and their "shipped" figures.
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
No battle mode over the internet, but there's still battle mode for local adhoc connections.
Erm. Huh?
..
You have developed for NDS and GBA but not PSP, and are saying the PSP development cycle is difficult. what the?
Having developed on both, and knowing many coders who have developed on both, the general consensus is that Nintendos support is horrendous. Their devkits - erm.. half assed at best (did you even have a GBA Nintendo devkit? - they are slower to use than the USB Carts!!!). And the NDS systems are really no better. Then if you want to talk about features the DS and GBA are sorely missing many many things that devvers have been asking to put on their ARM chips for YEARS!!.. an FPU for example - if you are a Nintendo developer, visit their forums, and read the _huge_ list of people asking for this (btw ARM chips with FPU are not much costlier either!!).
Then there is the VRAM issues, the DMA issues.. man.. talk about a complete mess. And everyone thought theyd clean it up with the DS.. bzzzt. Even the damn 3D is an utter pain.. two sets of normals?? come on!! After spending a single day devving on PSP.. I was hooked. We ported our code in just a couple of days.. and the huge amount of extra resources we now have, means our systems can have many extra features added.. how the heck can you say that is bad?
Console.. and handheld wise, the DS is a horrible dinosaur of hardware (dont get me started on IPC..) and shows how much Nintendo listen to their developers. Also, since I changed my IDE to code::blocks (I develop PC, PSP, DS all from the one IDE now.. its nice) I dont have to deal with the el-stupido metrowerks anymore (although I did like their debugger.. but their IDE sucks to hell).
As for submission and feedback etc.. I really dont think you have done many games before at all. Nintendo simply give you a tick or a cross, if you pass or fail. With a nice doc explaining.. what silly bit of crap they didnt like. Sony are NO different in their QA.. its exactly the same.. detailed report.. about some obscure text siting in the wrong spot.
Also, you NEVER submit concept submissions to Nintnedo unless you are a tier 1 developer - which is a handfull of the top of the line developers, and they actually get to write their own rules for QA.. I have seen so many breeches of the QA docs in the 1st tier games.. but its because they can. As a 3rd party developer, you go through a publisher, and guess what, you dont deal with Nintendo at all, or Sony. You simply get their reports and thats it. The publisher does all the submission, feedback, testing and approvals with Nintendo.
Both of my boys played online throughout an entire large mall last Monday. Any Wi-Fi hotspot with unsecured 802.11b seems to work.
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Not really. Japan had at least two major hits (the brain training games) that haven't yet hit the US. Those drove hardware sales a lot, and they nailed a new demographic (adult casual gamer) that neither the PSP nor the DS have really done much for yet in the States. That might change when the brain training games are released here this year, and it might not - depends on how well they translate, I suppose. (I seem to remember that at least some parts of them involved drawing/memorizing kanji, which wouldn't appeal much to the US crowd).
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Not to take anything from this, but I can't help but think that a significant part of Nintendo's success with the DS is due to the fact that the PSP turned out to be an utter failure. The expectations were a lot higher for the PSP and Sony failed to deliver. The DS struggled initially, there's wasn't much compelling for the DS at the start and I think people were still hoping for something good on the PSP. There's nothing but crap on that system while the DS has Nintendo's expertise in gaming supporting it. Nintendo made some sound decisions, going for a lower pricepoint and producing a relatively rugged system, unlike the fragile PSP. It's portability isn't hindered by slow, delicate optical media.
On the other hand, if Sony had put together a strong library of games I think the DS would have had some serious competition. Instead it looks like they considered the PSP to be nothing more than a portable PS2, so instead of producing unique titles for the console they resorted to porting games people had already played. It didn't help that EA was responsible for much of the console's library.
I certainly don't think it's the dual screen that made the DS successful. The console's success is due to Nintendo's impressive ability to know what's fun. If you want good gameplay you can't really go wrong with Nintendo. I still see the dual screen as a gimmick, but Nintendo has used it to great effect, even if many of their games aren't much more than glorified flash games, the likes of which we've played for years.
Nintendo understands that gameplay is the core of any game. Gameplay makes a game good, not ansiotropic filtered, pixel shaded, bloom-lit nonsense. I think consumers have been spoiled by developers touting cutting edge graphics in games. While there's a lot of crap out there, there are also some great games available with impressive graphics, so it isn't like people can't have both. This is going to be detrimental for the Revolution. I doubt it's unique controller, which a competitor could easily replicate, is going to provide any kind of advantage. Nintendo will likely make good use of it, but if other developers can't be bothered or have to do too much downgrading to get their games to run on the Revolution that system is likely to suffer the same fate as the Gamecube.
Within Nintendo's own sphere of games there isn't much variety, and worse yet, I think they're over-using their properties. How many more times can they reuse the Mario, Zelda and Metroid characters? They're playing it safe by sticking to characters everyone knows. It's time for the to get adventurous and come up with some new characters.
I have some satisfaction in seeing Sony get screwed, but I don't think Nintendo's success is necessarily due to some great innovation on their part.
Nintendogs' Bark Mode is peculiar to the game (although other games are adding similar functionality, like Animal Crossing: Wild World's Tag Mode). It's designed to be started, the lid of the DS closed, and put in your pocket while you walk through busy streets -- and had great success in Japan to this effect. Basically, it's designed to let your dog find other dogs without requiring either player to stop what they're doing.
Most DS multiplayer games are in fact true concurrent multiplayer, like Meteos (best puzzle game ever), Mario Kart, etc. Animal Crossing's main multiplayer mode is also concurrent and online with Wi-Fi Connection to boot.
Well, I bought a Nintendo DS with the sole purpose of playing Nintendogs; the game itself is awesome, it has us drooling and really, really impressed, and is topic for another discussion. The console itself has a great design, I'm quite impressed with the features, specs, design and ergonomics. I then bought Mario Kart DS and I now think that online play is the DS's killer app; it's tremendously fun to duke it out online with people, and I can only imagine how much fun it would be to play with people on a LAN setup. I decided to steer away from Nintendo after I hated my N64, but the NDS just won me over again.
Buy the USB adaptor. It only accepts connections from approved Nintendo systems (i.e. you have to authorize each unit on your computer).
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Some tiny portion, in the future, at the end of its commercial lifetime, which will then be sold cheap to someone prepared to sell them for a few bucks. At the moment the difference is irrelevant. If they're being made then they're being sold.
Nope. Stores can and do ship back unsold merchandise to manufacturers in exchange for credits that they can then use to purchase other merchandise from the same manufacturer. That merchandise then generally gets moved around to other retailers who actually want it, but not always. Sometimes it just sits in a warehouse for years. If it does get shipped to another retailer, it gets counted twice in the "shipped" number (because it was, in fact, shipped twice).
Whenever you see a "shipped" number (or "sold to retailers" which is the same thing), then you can be assured that the company is at the very least hedging against the next quarter's numbers. If there's a wide disparity between "shipped" and "sold", they will quote "shipped", which basically just puts off the bad news for a quarter or two when that low demand starts being reflected in shipments too.
You can see that happening with the PSP now. The PSP was outselling the DS initially - at least according to Sony's "shipment" reports. But now, it's the other way around, and the disparity is growing. Nintendo has sold 4 million DS's in the US, and while Sony has basically stopped putting out releases, NPD says they've sold 2.5 million PSP's. 600,000 of those - nearly 25% - were during the launch week (compared to 400,000 DS's - or 10% of that system's US total).
In Japan, which gets weekly sales numbers published publicly, the disparity is even larger, and the DS is currently outselling the PSP by four to one. (For the week of December 18, Nintendo sold 408,000 DS's, while Sony sold 95,000 PSP's.)
So "shipped" vs. "sold" definitely does mean something. It's a sign that at best, a manufacturer is not confident in its sell-through numbers and is trying (usually in vain) to prop up public interest and make the system sound more popular than it is. Eventually, though, you will see even "shipped" numbers start to drop, as retailers stop placing orders for new units and even return unsold merchandise. That's usually the point when the press releases start to dry up too.
actually, it [units shipped] is the preferred accounting number to use.
Sure, if what you want to measure is the amount of money made by the manufacturer. (And with Sony and Microsoft, that metric tends to be negative when discussing console hardware.)
On the other hand, if what you want to measure is the popularity of a console, a more valuable metric is to look at how many consoles are actually owned by the gaming populace. As a bonus, retail sales are relatively easy to quantify and audit.
Perhaps an even MORE valuable metric would be to look at how gamers spend their time playing those consoles, but that can't be measured as accurately as sales can. I did see an interesting survey about the current generation of home consoles a while back though, which suggested that about 40% of gamers' time was spent on Xbox, while PS2 and Gamecube were around 10%. If true, this would suggest that even if equal numbers of Xboxen and PS2s were sold, the MS offering is actually a much more successful product.