A rather harsh headline I know, but it’s the truth according to Nintendo’s handheld product manager James Honeywell who recently had the chance to speak to trade publication MCV.
Those of you who work within some sector of the games industry would have seen the Ds Lite retail guide that accompanied this week’s edition of the revered trade magazine, in which Honeywell spoke of how Nintendo Ds sales compare with its rival the Sony PSP.
“Up until the end of last year sale between the two formats were fairly evenly matched, with DS slightly outselling PSP,” Honeywell stated. “Since the beginning of the year, with our stellar line-up of releases, we have pushed our sales through the roof. Then with the fantastic launch of DS Lite in June we have begun to pull further and further away.
“Right now, with the combination of DS and DS Lite we are outselling the competition by a ratio of 3:1. This increase in hardware sales has also driven an increase in DS software sales, moving ahead of PSP in the total number of units and also, more interestingly, we have now seen that the same third party titles are selling more on the DS than on other formats.
“We are seeing publishers start to rethink their strategies switching development from other formats to the successful DS platform and, more importantly, creating bespoke titles that fully utilise the DS features rather than simply porting content without taking advantage of the great things you can do on DS.”
Although it seems in statistics that the Nintendo Ds is dominating the hand-held market, I recently had the opportunity to question my manager about just how well both portable consoles were selling in our store, the rather surprising answer I received was that sales for both consoles appeared to be neck and neck.
With Nintendo continuing to have the firm lead on the handheld market, and Sony determined to do everything in its power to catch up, it’s certainly going to be interesting to see just how hardware sales pan out for both systems over the all important, and ever nearing Christmas period.
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