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Nintendo DS Sales Driving Games Industry Growth
VonSnouty writes "After watching Sony and to a lesser extent Microsoft stealing market share over the past few years, the DS is seeing Nintendo producing its most bullish numbers for years. Indeed, it's just used the latest NPD figures to claim that the Nintendo DS is largely responsible for US games industry growth in 2006 so far. From the article: 'Up until the end of September, the U.S. industry overall shows revenue growth of 11 per cent when compared with the same period in 2005. Nearly all of the growth comes from the portable DS — without it, the industry would report a mere 1.6 per cent growth over the past nine months.'"
Haven't seen the commercial, but wow, that sounds just like my significant other. With both of us being parents, we do have to wait on kids to get out of class and numerous other time waiting activities.
I grew up on the Intellivision, TRS-80s, and of course the NES. My SO, (in her words) was never what you would consider a gamer of any system. Nothing more than playing the occasional game or two, whenever she was around others that were gaming.
Our kids are what I would consider to be hardcore gamers (time-wise), but guess who spends the most time with a DS???? That would be myself or my girlfriend, mostly when we have time to kill waiting on someone. She also still heavily uses the Palm Zire 72 that I purchased for her a few Christmases ago, mostly playing touch-screen based games. Go figure.
IMHO, Nintendo's role in spurring growth in the market, is probably based a lot on situations like mine where not only do the kids have DSes, but so do the two adults in the house. Currently, we have 4 DSes, soon to be adding a fifth unit for the youngest (will be 6 just before Christmas).
If you want my opinion on why the GBA SP did so well, it was probably based around the same idea that each home possibly has more than one unit. Ours has 5 of them!!!! In that sense, Nintendo has made more off of us with hardware sales than either Microsoft or Sony per console generation. It's funny I've really never thought of it that way, but that's what bean counters have surely planned for in their marketing plans for these portables.
Brain Age is a great game and we've heard a lot about it, but so far, the numbers don't indicate that it's doing what HALO did for the Xbox.
Nintendo doesn't need a HALO to do what HALO did for the Xbox. There is a whole library of HALOs on the DS. It was easy for one above average game to start moving Xbox's...but when you have such a great library like the DS has, you'll rarely see one game pull those kinds of numbers. It's spread out a bit more.
It's important to understand exactly how casual the casual market is. My sister bought a GBA because she had a 7 hour wait in an airport and it seemed like something she'd use a lot. She certainly got her moneys worth out of it. For Nintendo that's not something very untypical. It's why they include batteries with GBAs. The switch to lithium was probably inevitable though. They are the ultimate impulse purchase. An iPod doesn't compare because you have to load music onto it so it's not something that can be used out of the box.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
I agree with you about not liking clauses, but for what it's worth, a friend of mine got a couple of Gamecube discs that his kids had mangled (and one he'd lost) replaced by NoA (he had previously registered them on their website). If they're gonna be really good about replcing discs no questions asked, I don't really mind clauses like that quite as much.