Amid the clamor of cellphones and Xperia Plays and other chatter about portable gaming platforms, there’s one name that doesn’t come up much, and really should: Nintendo. Nintendo has dominated the portable gaming market for more than two decades, whether it was creating the whole market with the Game Boy or creating the single most successful system of the last generation, the Nintendo DS.
So how has the 3DS been doing? Incredibly well, naturally. All the details, plus Sony’s PSP price cut and all the Virtual Boy jokes you can stand, here today on Uproxx News.
The 3DS sold exactly 400,000 units last Saturday. How do we know the exact figure? Because Nintendo shipped 400,000 units, and sold every last one of them.
To give you an idea of how ambitious this is intending to be, Nintendo plans to sell ten times that total worldwide by the end of March. For a system that starts selling in Europe on March 25th and America March 27th. Yeah, they’re pretty sure they’ve got a hit on their hands.
The 3DS, of course, is a system that allows gamers to play 3D games without wearing those ridiculous glasses that have driven 3D movies right into the ground. But, since that isn’t enough and Nintendo loves weird inputs anyway, it also has two screens, the classic button and d-pad configuration, a microscope, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and probably a death ray if you get the right configuration.
Oh, and, needless to say for a computer system unleashed in the land of obsessive, lonely single nerds, the 3DS has already been hacked to accept emulators and mods. So maybe we really will finally get Time Traveler on the 3DS, legally or illegally.
Meanwhile, Sony, faced with its NGP portable console not coming out until fourth quarter 2011 and with a competitor who beat them with a pipe wrench while laughing at their inferior capabilities, announced the PSP will get a $40 price cut. Now, instead of it being overpriced at $170, it’ll finally be price matched with its competitor the Nintendo DS.
This comes years after the DS beat the PSP in sales, despite multiple attempts to reinvent it. The PSP Go, essentially a PSP with a fancy sliding controller, is still going to cost $200. Maybe Sony is hoping with the 3DS at $250, the PSP Go will seem like a better deal? Or that people will mistake it for an Xperia or something? That seems a sounder market strategy than “attempt to take on a market leader that has beaten you multiple times and has a hot new product you can’t hope to match”, at least to us.
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- Nintendo proves once again that they can sell pretty much anything to the Japanese if it looks cool enough. (CNET)
- Meanwhile, hackers demonstrate that region locking and other piracy controls are pretty much utterly pointless, hacking the 3DS in less than 24 hours. (CVG)
- And Sony, meanwhile, tries to move a few more PSPs before they put a bullet in its head and move on. (Yahoo!)
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- In mobile news, Vodafone, the biggest mobile telecommunications company in the entire world, was taken out Monday morning. Voice, text, everything was completely dead and utterly unable to be used. Why? Because some criminals had broken into their Basingstoke facility and accidentally damaged some of the data equipment they were trying to steal in the first place. Yes, a bunch of incompetent crooks knocked out telecommunications for an entire nation by accidennt. Boy, we bet the British feel really safe and secure right now! (Telegraph)
- The city that topped a study for most online flirting? Athens. Greeks claim it’s because flirting is just a natural part of their communication and they live a naturally hedonistic lifestyle, while the other cities mostly grumble about Athens stealing their boyfriend. And, hey, with the Greek economy the way it is, what else is there to do, anyway? (Reuters)
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- The Nintendo DS has sold, over its lifetime, 145 million units. You know, one to your sister, one to your mom, one to your little brother…(VGChartz)
- We may mock the PSP, but it’s not like it’s doing badly in second: it’s sold 66 million units over its lifetime. (VGChartz)
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