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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.
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.
That's 20 million screens!
And I'll bet 30 million lost styl-i by now...
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Free, with a game that supports it.
Official Site
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
For my money, the Nintendo DS has had the best signal to noise ratio, with regards to the quality of the games, of any system in its first year since the Dreamcast. Probably even better. I've been absolutely astonished at how often I keep coming back to this little guy, especially considering how dismal it was at launch. The games are really coming at a good pace now...it is hard for a guy with a WoW addiction to keep up.
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
get a DS and an iPod with video.
just say no to the Sony rape machine.
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
It just occurred to me that having 2 screens and one touch sensitive one is an excellent way of avoiding someone creating a PSP emulator of the DS. Clever Nintento :)
;)
Maybe someone can create one for my Sony Ericsson P910i, which has a tall touch sentsitive screen.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
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.
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....
And yet I can't find a single person over the age of 18 that has one. Other than... me...
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Forbes:
"With more than five million units sold in Japan since its December 2004 regional launch, the DS has become the fastest-selling gaming machine in the country's history. Japanese gamers have also bought more than a million copies of four different titles within one year of the system's launch: Nintendogs--a game where users play with, train, pet, and wash a virtual dog, Animal Crossing, Wild World, Brain Age, and Brain Flex."
- Chris Noon
Gamespot:
"With more than 5 million units sold in Japan since its December 2004 regional launch, the DS has become the fastest-selling gaming machine in Japan's history. In another first, Japanese gamers have scooped up more than a million copies of four different titles within one year of a system's launch: Nintendogs, Animal Crossing: Wild World, Brain Age, and Brain Flex."
- Tim Surette
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
...And better developer support
I have developed games for the GBA, DS & have access to a PSP dev kit for which we have not developed a game yet
From the development point of view, NOA is a lot easier to deal with throughout the whole process (concept submission, feedback, testing & final approval) - Sony on the other hand almost makes the developer feel like they are doing them a favor by letting them develop for the PSP - the whole process is overly convoluted and a major pain in the ass...
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.
Everyone seemed to have been predicting the demise of Nintendo, or at least becoming relegated to the status of a second-rate gaming hardware company. With two giants in close proximity (Sony and Microsoft), it's good to see that at least some semblance of balance will continue for a while longer.
I think Game Boys are illegal in Greece
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-956357.html
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
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.
No one wants to say it, but one factor that I think may account for increased Nintendo DS and GBA sales is the availability of flash backup cartridges and pirated ROMs.
Pirates like to tell themselves that "everybody is doing it," but I'd be amazed if even 1% of DS buyers are playing such pirated games. This isn't something that unsophisticated users can simply trade across the internet like mp3's by simply firing up LimeWire, so it is likely to remain confined to a tiny minority of hackers.
Hey man, I spent the better part of highschool holed up in my room with my two best friends and my brother, beating the shit out of each other with turtle shells and banana peels. ;)
I want to share this bonding ritual with strangers all over the world (and pwn them!)
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
"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
4 million in Japan and 5 million in the US leaves just 1 million sales in the rest of the world, presumably mostly in Europe. In terms of market size, Europe is pretty big, I wonder why the DS sales are so much lower?
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.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Here in Japan (Nagoya), I see DSes everywhere. Toy stores and department stores have big DS (and Gameboy) sections, but I've yet to notice any PSPs, though I suppose they must be tucked away somewhere. I also see a lot of kids carrying around DSes, but again, I've never even seen a PSP here. I did see a PSP subway ad once.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
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.
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
My opinion is the stylus. I think - just like the Nintendo Revolution is aimed at non-gamers by giving them a more familiar control (the remote control thingy) the stylus allows non-gamers a more simple interface (a pen in this case). The funny thing is when the DS first came out it was the stylus that made me overlook the device for many months - I had dismissed it as gimmicky. Well, between train your brain and the kick-ass game "under the knife" I am a firm believer that the stylus has allowed totally new genres of games to be created.
The final result, both my sister and my girlfriend kicked my ass in the math and memory games. My all time best score for 20 math problems was 17 seconds, where my sister had 15 seconds, and my girlfriend had 14 seconds. My mom came in with a respectable 28 seconds. So for all those years the three constantly derided me for being a gamer they finally got a taste of the addictive nature of games. :)
Hey man, I spent the better part of highschool holed up in my room with my two best friends and my brother, beating the shit out of each other with turtle shells and banana peels. ;)
Wow. Your parents should have bought you a Nintendo or something.
The DS's numbers are impressive, but we aren't anywhere close to the peak of the system.
Great games like Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, and Nintendogs, and some interesting titles like Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney and XX-XY, have shown consumers that the touch screen is not a gimmick. If I recall correctly, NiFi already has half a million users, and that's after a month of NiFi. By comparison, doesn't XBox Live have a little over a million after at least a year?
There are still hot games coming to the DS to spur sales, too. The Pokemon series has consecutively been a hot seller, oftening bumping hardware unit sales with its release. Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, the first regular RPG entries to the series on the DS, is due out sometime this year. It has been confirmed that these games will use NiFi to trade Pokemon, chat, and, most importantly, battle. The trade-and-battle theme of Pokemon has screamed for MMO features, and the DS is the first machine equipped and ready to take the charge. (This will be the game that gets me to buy a DS.)
If Pokemon is not your thing, you're not out of luck. Metroid Prime: Hunters, the much delayed multiplayer FPS, might be right up your alley. The Metroid Prime series has had strong sales, and when this game finally releases, it's going to boost sales (sorry for the pun) once again. (I'm uncertain, but I believe part of the delay was to add NiFi to MP:H).
And remember, we're still waiting for a Zelda game. While one has been confirmed in process, no details have been released. Did someone say Twilight Princess followup?
It's successes like this that allow Nintendo to go to the edge with new ideas like the Revolution.
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a fanboy, and my rantings may be taken as such.
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
If he doesn't care much about the quality of the picture.. Gameboy Movie Player
Buy a $10 card-reader and a $50 gigabyte (hell, buy two) compact flash card, and you've got 3 movies, lots of music (as long as you don't care too much about the quality of that music) customizable interfaces, e-reader, image viewer, AND a NES emulator (kinda sucks, only supports roms under 200k) for your Nintendo GBA/DS.
The player comes with DVD ripping software and converter for Movies, images, and music. But if you're lazy like me...
GBA film, a Chinese DVD to GBA format site. Has a ton of movies to peruse, Most have subtitles, but the American native ones are in the original english.
Switching from Movies to Old school Mario to new school Mario Kart DS have made those long flights almost bearable.
| - | - |
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).
--- Bwah?
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.
I will buy DS if it is not that ugly...
... Let me make a wild guess here. You were a Backstreet Boys fan. Their earlier stuff moved you... you laughed, you cried. Yet, as the years went by and as their popularity grew, your love for them cooled. Was their work compromised by fame or money? You weren't quite sure... but you were ready to move on, and weren't going to wait to find out.
Now, you're a Black Eyed Peas fan, and you're not looking back.
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
Alot of people ague to me that 'Yes, the DS may have good games, but the PSP can play DVDs!' which annoys me as, if you buy a DS you can afford to buy a small travel DVD player with built in screen, that will play DVDs, unlike the PSP, which only plays UMDs. People don't seem to realise that the PSP is a little small to fit a DVD in. I even have GBAMP, 2 x 512 compact flash cards and FlashMe and am using moonshell to watch video and listen to music on my DS. And with Advance Wars and Mario Kart. It's a much better console games-wise. The PSP has only two advantages. Better Screen, Better Graphics. And, To be honest, I like having two screens without any dead pixels, and with the gameplay of the DS, I don't care about the graphics either.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
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.
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.