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."
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.