3DS success proves Nintendo was right to continue in handheld market

NewsPosted 27/01/2012 - 10:44am GMT

Happy to prove naysayers wrong.

The 15 million success of Nintendo 3DS proves that despite the growth of mobile gaming, there remains a strong market for traditional handhelds, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said.

"Last summer, when the sales pace of the Nintendo 3DS was slow, there were extreme remarks saying, 'With the penetration of smartphones, will there still be a market for handheld hardware?' which was almost equal to 'Handheld hardware is not necessary anymore'" he told investors.

"I believe we proved that such opinions are incorrect."

Having been forced to slash the price of the 3DS in order to pull the system out of its sales slump, Nintendo has been making a loss on each system sold, but this won't be the case for much longer.

"In the first half of the next fiscal term, we are now anticipating to get out of the situation that we sell the hardware below cost," confirmed Iwata.

Nintendo's next fiscal year begins April 2012.

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User Comments

dav2612

The success also proves that traditional handhelds need to be priced sensibly to begin with.

Posted 11:10 on 27 January 2012

Woffls

Smartphones have taken away some market share for sure, but 200 million downloads of Angry Birds doesn't mean 200 million fewer DS/PSP games sold. What it means is 200 million people downloaded Angry Birds.

Mobile gaming has expanded the market in general by a considerable margin, and more people will be playing games now than ever before. New gamers will move onto other platforms eventually, and that will vastly outweigh the loss that traditional platform holders are seeing at the moment.

Posted 10:54 on 27 January 2012