Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's good to see them stating sales rather than shipments, unlike Sony, which likes to brag about how many units have been shipped out of their factories but not about how many have actually left the store. That said, I'm a big Nintendo fan, and even I feel inclined to take these numbers as being slightly exagerated, if only by rounding up. Still, this is very, very nice to hear. Perhaps there is room in this industry for innovation after all.
You know, kinda like what happened with these handhelds. =)
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
There's a reason the Gamecube hasn't been selling well... no good new games for it!
I enjoy my Gamecube more than my PS2 and Xbox, but even I'll admit that the support for the GC has been dwindling... really the only game on the horizon that looks promising is Zelda.
And, the Revolution will be coming out hopefully within a few months of Zelda for the GC... the GC is near the end of its life, there's a reason why sales are starting to slow.
"WEP Key is a security setting for your router. WEP is the only security that is compatible with the Nintendo DS Wi-Fi Connection. You will need to set your router for WEP security -- or remove security on your router -- to use the Nintendo DS at this access point." Nintendo
I wish they supported WPA. WEP sucks and no security is not a good option for home use.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
The first thing I thought of when you said that was the headline: Outraged parents demand parental controls. Think about this for a second? You are taking a gaming machine that you can trust your kids to drive around and jump on evil snails to kill them and opening up the potential for anything- porn, news, viruses, scripting, java, etc. Why would you do that as Nintendo? It's a parental control nightmare and a security nightmare.
The second argument is why would you go outside its intended purpose? It's a gaming handheld machine with a few buttons and a touch-screen. You'd have be bring in typing (keyboard) for URLs, viewing of various image formats, scripting, and other joyous necessities (ever tried turning off javascript and surfing... you won't get far). If someone wants the web, they have a cell phone and a computer.
If I recall correctly, isn't chat built in though?
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Something that a lot of people missed when the DS and PSP were introduced, was the price point.
Taking a look at Argos (major UK retailer, the kind of place many people buy these things from)...
* PSP : 180GBP
* Nintendo DS : 90GBP
PSP games start at 30GBP and go up to 35. DS games start at 15 and go up to 30.
The DS is not selling to the kind of people who will put down 200quid for a graphics card just to play the latest blood-fest, it sells to the huge number of casual gamers who want something fun. For the price of a PSP you can buy a DS and three games.
The DS also sells to parents buying presents and I imagine it did a hell of a lot better over christmas than the PSP.
This is exactly what happened with the original gameboy. When I was a kid I, and most of my friends had gameboys. They may not have been colour like the Sega Gamegear or Atari Lynx, but our parents could afford them, the batteries lasted an age, and the games were fantastic. Colour would have been great, but it wasn't worth the money (and the power drain)
Sheer brute force power is not everything when it comes to these sorts of machines. Nintendo understands this. The handheld market is not just a portable version of the mainstream. It is a whole other beast.
Paul Leader
This is much more common than what you might think. 90% of news articles these days are actually just recycled press releases. Companies, organizations, nutbags, and other misfits push out a press release to thousands of "news organizations," who then recycle much of the release verbatim, and then release it as "news".
The downside is that 90% of news is of low quality with no investigation or questioning ever occuring during the writing of the article.
The updside is that, if you know how to work the system, you can get massive coverage for your comany/organization/sex toy shop.
Most likely they didn't want to do battle mode over IP because it'd be a lot more sensitive to lag issues than race mode.
Consider: there's not -too- much in race mode that matters, apart from whether your opponent is in front of you, or behind. If you see lag in race mode, most likely it'll mean your opponent's position jumps around (or even that they fall off the track, and mysteriously reappear on it without losing time) - but at a very basic level, the needs of the race are met, in that the relationship between how long it's taking you to get around the track, and how long it's taking them to get around the track is maintained. Every time you get a sync packet from an opponent everything's right with the world again. As for powerups, usually in race mode if you're in a position where you can effectively use a powerup, it won't be too sensitive to lag unless the two players are really right on top of each other. (Drafting doesn't work too well in a laggy game, of course, and in that situation it's tough to say whether a banana peel or other weapon dropped behind the lead player will hit the trailing player...) I guess you could say that while powerups still work in a laggy game, the "combat" aspects of the race mode are those which suffer the most from the lag.
Battle-mode is, of course, completely combat-oriented. The game isn't oriented around a circuit in which there is an "ahead" and "behind", rather everyone's free to race around and try to fire weapons at each other. It could still work but given that the relationship between players' positions is much less consistent than in a race, and since the entire battle game revolves around powerups and direct kart-to-kart interactions, it would be harder to give a good battle game experience than it is to give a good race experience.
I love the online race mode, too - it's sort of frustrating sometimes that you can't communicate with your opponents over the link, but other times it's not. It keeps people focused on the game itself rather than all the bickering that often goes with other online games in between rounds. I'm glad they allow the custom emblems, though - it gives people who want to be a jackass an opportunity to do so, but also allows personalization. Really, though, given the potential for abuse I'm surprised they did it at all.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
I do know a lot of people in their 30s who also own a DS, and they bought it from word of mouth and actually having played one. Hopefully the way the DS is selling is a preview of what is to come with the Revolution. I look at the PSP and XBox360 and I just am not excited. Sure, they have some amazing hardware. Blazing processors, awesome widescreen goodness. But the games... The gameplay.. It's just the same thing in a newer package. With the DS i'm drawing jumps for Kirby to launch off of to finish the level! I'm drawing spirals to have him avoid being hit! I haven't had this much fun since the 2600.