Slashdot Mirror
Quantifying the DS Lite's Japanese Dominance
kukyfrope writes "According to the data trackers at Media Create, for the week of May 29th through June 4th the DS Lite sold 135,614 units in Japan, easily beating out the PSP (24,595 units), PS2 (18,513 units) and Xbox 360 (just 1,245 units). New Super Mario Bros. for DS also sold 334,208 units, putting total sales at about 1.2 million, in just 2 weeks. 'From the end of last year up until right now the sales of DS and DS Lite in Japan have been simply explosive. It was unprecedented in the Japanese game [industry] history for there to be that kind of incredible demand for one platform,' said Nintendo President Satoru Iwata."
I haven't seen a DS outside of a store either other than one friend who has one.
For a handheld that is about 100 dollars more expensive that is a pretty close race if you estimate it somewhere in the 16 million DS vs ~13-14 million PSPs sold.
The stuff Sony has planned for PS3 PSP integration sounds very cool and will probably get me to buy a PSP. I wish the PSP would fit more easily in one hand and function like an iPod though. Some sort of PSP/iPod/Cellphone would be the ultimate.
Playing my friends DS is a lot of fun every once in a while, but I don't know if the games are anything I would want to invest in to play all the time.
"You heard wrong, badly wrong. The 360 was outsold by the original Xbox within a week or 2 of release. I'm not 100% certain it even beat the original xbox on week one."
Yes, the 360 still hasn't sold through its initial 150k shipment to Japan. I think they are only up to around 130k or so last time I checked. Sales have been slowing declining for the 360 in Japan, so I don't know if the system will ever actually make it through the initial batch.
The 360 is doing about half the rate of the first Xbox in the US and Europe. It is around 2 million worldwide right now. There was a huge drop in demand this past month. If that trend down continues next month Microsoft is going to be forced to go for a large price cut or they are in danger of having publishers start pulling titles from the system.
There's that, but there is also a whole new segment of usually non-gamers buying DS Lites to play the non-gamers games (such as Brain Age, Nintendogs or Animal Crossing). This is supported by the fact that, on the opening of the stores for the launch of the DS Lite (on launch day and all) you could find women and elders heavily represented, while these launch-day queues are usually filled only with "young" (15-30) men.
I haven't seen numbers, but I've seen some pictures when the DS:L launched and quite a lot of reports on that.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
As I understand, they will take some units back from overstocked retailers, then shipping the unit to someone else. This counts as 2 shipped. Potentially, you could have 20 million manufactured and 25 million shipped.
I've heard of retailers being purposely overstocked by software vendors for the same purpose. I don't know if Sony does the same, but I'm sure they have the means to do so. It's called channel stuffing.