• Hey everyone, staff have documented a list of banned content and subject matter that we feel are not consistent with site values, and don't make sense to host discussion of on Famiboards. This list (and the relevant reasoning per item) is viewable here.
  • Furukawa Speaks! We discuss the announcement of the Nintendo Switch Successor and our June Direct Predictions on the new episode of the Famiboards Discussion Club! Check it out here!

Discussion For curiosity I compared for the first time the sales of DS vs. 3DS games and the results were very interesting.

ILovethegameAC

ILovethegameAC

Boo
Pronouns
He
I'm not sure it this is super well known among most people here, but I personally wasn't super sure about how much did the sales of 3DS software declined when compared to the DS, since as we know the console sold half of what it's predecessor did and it also sold less than a half of the software, so I went to see those numbers (using the Wikipedia data) expecting a huge drop on everything, but that's not really what happened.

First, when it comes to the most popular and best selling stuff, if we don't count completely casual focused stuff like Nintendogs or Brain Age, it was a big surprise that overall there wasn't much of a drop in software sales at all compared to the DS, and in fact in many cases some series sold even more:

-Original mainline Pokémon games on average sold about the same between the DS and 3DS with around 16 million, just a tiny bit less on 3DS, however the remakes and third version sold more on 3DS, making the 3DS Pokémon games more succesful on average than on DS.
-Animal Crossing Wild World was already one of the most succesful DS games with over 11.7 million copies sold, however New Leaf on 3DS sold even better with 13 million.
-Mainline Zelda games on 3DS (OOT3D, MM3D and ALBW) sold also around a million more on average than the 2 games for the DS (PH and ST).
-Super Mario 3D Land also outsold 64DS by a tiny bit.
-I think I don't have to mention the huge boost that Fire Emblem had on 3DS.
-Tomodachi Life sold twice as much on 3DS than on DS, although having in mind that the original was a japanese exclusive while the sequel wasn't.
-Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, while a Wii Port of a game that already sold well, managed to outsold both DK Jungle Climber and Diddy Kong Racing DS by a lot.
-Mario Kart 7 did sell less than DS, however the drop was only about 20%.
-Mainline Kirby games also had on average a drop of 20% or so, motly because of the lower sales of Planet Robobot. However, Triple Deluxe did outsell Squeak Squad and was short of topping Super Star Ultra.
-As an extra, the 2 biggest third party series on 3DS, being Monster Hunter and Yokai Watch, got overall higher sales than the biggest third party series on DS, in this case Professor Layton and Dragon Quest.

However there are a few random cases of these kinds of games selling a lot less on 3DS, with the most obvious being New Super Mario Bros 2 selling only half of what the original did (15M vs. 30M), plus also none of the 3DS Mario Party sold even close to what the 9 million DS entry did, but maybe that's because they were all mediocre and there wasn't a lot of good word of mouth on them. Other than that there are some cases of series dropping about 30% or 40% in sales like Mario & Luigi Dream Team compared to BiS or Yoshi's Island DS compared to New Island, which still isn't completely a terrible drop worthy of a console that sold half of it's predecessor. Other specific big drops in sales like WarioWare, Metroid and Rythm Heaven could be explained with the fact that their entries came way too late on the system's life and with not a lot of fanfare in some cases.

However, the reasons of the 50% drop become clear when seeing the other games:

-Stuff like Nintendogs and Braing Age, which were some of the biggest games on the platform, selling 20M each and outselling stuff like Pokémon DP, massively dropped in sales, with Nintendogs + Cats selling 5 times less than the DS entry, while the 3DS Brain Age game probably didn't even top 1 million sales since there are no clear numbers given by Nintendo, making it at best 5% of what the original game on DS did. For this reason the other casual oriented game on DS from Nintendo that sold millions like Big Brain Academy or games centered on cooking or lerning english didn't have follow ups on 3DS. It's very obvious than those sales were lost because of the mobile market and how easy was to see similar games on them, not needing to own a dedicated console.

-Another thing is that the DS had multiple licensed kid games, like stuff based on movies, TV shows, the Lego games or even stuff like the Imagine games by Ubisoft, and those also sold substantially less on 3DS, and for that reason there were significantly less games released of these kinds on it. There weren't a lot of these games among the top best selling DS games, but the thing is that there were a lot of them in total, and very different to each other, that sold 1M or maybe close to it, so it's easy to think that a lot of parents bought a DS with these kinds of games to very young children or babies and, once again, with the 3DS it was likely that parents of the new generation now would prefer to just give a cell phone to them, and also those little kids who had a DS with these mostly cheap and simple games didn't become Nintendo fans and didn't care about the 3DS after growing up.

So the most interesting conclusions I got out of this is that it seemed that the 3DS basically had the same amount of "core players", counting both young and adults, than the DS since most of the games for that public sold around the same on both systems, so mobiles didn't really take away those players, and if they did they were balanced by some younger core players that got a 3DS and never had a DS before. Meanwhile in comparison the real loss in sales come from both the casuals that bought it to play stuff like Brain Age or Nintendogs and also parents who bough DS to very young children or babies, both being easily replaced by mobiles. That las part was indeed very obvious, but I really didn't expect that the other games kept selling the same, showing that the effect of the mobile market was only notable on the more casual players.

It is very shocking that these groups of casual players and very little kids accumulate for around 77 million of lost players though, since Brain Age and Nintendogs together go for a total of 40 million if there was no overlapping (which there probably was, so it's probably around 30 million or so), maybe there was another factor like the fact that the 3DS on it's peak was more difficult to pirate games than the DS thanks to the R4, so maybe a few million players who couldn't afford games didn't buy it like they did with the DS, or maybe a lot of people bought it to play New Super Mario Bros. and then didn't play anything else, explaining the drop in sales of that game in particular that doesn't happen with the rest.
 
Last edited:
I think one big omission from this analysis could be piracy. Not like 3DS had none (it's really easy to hack your 3DS yadda yadda), but I never saw stores selling 3DS packed with pirated games like I saw with DS and R4s.
 
Great analysis. I think one thing that is clear is that the casual gamer user base collapsed during the DS-3DS transition because of the rise of mobile gaming. So a bigger percentage of the 3DS user base were ''core gamers'' than on the DS.
 
Lant_War said:
I think one big omission from this analysis could be piracy. Not like 3DS had none (it's really easy to hack your 3DS yadda yadda), but I never saw stores selling 3DS packed with pirated games like I saw with DS and R4s.
Click to expand...
I did quickly mentioned by the end. However I have heard a lot of people from markets with a lot of piracy like Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, South Asia and South East Asia that the DS was extremely niche there while hacked PSP's dominated. So the effects of piracy on DS was mostly limited to Latin America, where the DS indeed was very popular in some countries like Mexico, Chile or Venezuela, or some people in the US and Europe with more limited resources, but that's it. It was probably not as much as a blow as it was with the Vita compared to PSP.
Edit: not saying that it wasn't important, it definitely was and at least a few million sales were lost, but it's hard to say if it was a massive blow or just a little problem.
 
Last edited:
Yet we are supposed to believe 3DS was a disgrace for Nintendo, and brought shame to the company
 
ILovethegameAC said:
So the most interesting conclusions I got out of this is that it seemed that the 3DS basically had the same amount of "core players", counting both young and adults, than the DS since most of the games for that public sold around the same on both systems, so mobiles didn't really take away those players, and if they did they were balanced by some younger core players that got a 3DS and never had a DS before. Meanwhile in comparison the real loss in sales come from both the casuals that bought it to play stuff like Brain Age or Nintendogs and also parents who bough DS to very young children or babies, both being easily replaced by mobiles. That las part was indeed very obvious, but I really didn't expect that the other games kept selling the same.
Click to expand...

There's a few points in your post I'll disagree with, or think you missed some things on, in that, first, that the 3DS was basically the only Nintendo platform for most of its life. There was a massive contraction in number of core players, but a number of people who previously were playing the Wii had to get a 3DS for their nintendo fix.

Second, DS piracy was out of control, check out the software sales of the hardware https://www.statista.com/statistics/349048/nintendo-ds-software-unit-sales/ and compare it with basically any other device, that kind of drop is practically unprecedented, and it's certainly not because the hardware stopped selling. They sold 27m more units of the DS in 2010 and yet software sales dropped almost 25%.

And despite that, Pokemon also only managed to go blow to blow in the end with the DS games because pokemon go revitalised the series sales and pushed a lot of extra units surprisingly later in the consoles life.

ILovethegameAC said:
I did quickly mentioned by the end. However I have heard a lot of people from markets with a lot of piracy like Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, South Asia and South East Asia that the DS was extremely niche there while hacked PSP's dominated. So the effects of piracy on DS was mostly limited to Latin America, where the DS indeed was very popular in some countries like Mexico, Chile or Venezuela, or some people in the US and Europe with more limited resources, but that's it. It was probably not as much as a blow as it was with the Vita compared to PSP.
Click to expand...

You vastly underestimate just how widespread DS piracy was. There's a reason nintendo dropped software support for the DS faster than they did literally any other handheld, despite it being their most successful device ever at the time.
 
Linkstrikesback said:
There's a few points in your post I'll disagree with, or think you missed some things on, in that, first, that the 3DS was basically the only Nintendo platform for most of its life. There was a massive contraction in number of core players, but a number of people who previously were playing the Wii had to get a 3DS for their nintendo fix.

Second, DS piracy was out of control, check out the software sales of the hardware https://www.statista.com/statistics/349048/nintendo-ds-software-unit-sales/ and compare it with basically any other device, that kind of drop is practically unprecedented, and it's certainly not because the hardware stopped selling.

And despite that, Pokemon also only managed to go blow to blow in the end with the DS games because pokemon go revitalised the series sales and pushed a lot of extra units surprisingly later in the consoles life.
Click to expand...
What were Pokemon's numbers on the 3DS prior to Go? I thought X/Y and ORAS sold very well, even prior to Go
 
Piracy was kinda ridiculous during that period. During the late 2000s, half the time I encountered someone with a DS, they were playing with a flash cart that had a ton of games on it, and every PSP had already been hacked to have a dozen emulators on it. Hell, the first time I saw a PSP in the wild was someone playing Super Mario 64 on it.
 
Linkstrikesback said:
There's a few points in your post I'll disagree with, or think you missed some things on, in that, first, that the 3DS was basically the only Nintendo platform for most of its life. There was a massive contraction in number of core players, but a number of people who previously were playing the Wii had to get a 3DS for their nintendo fix.

Second, DS piracy was out of control, check out the software sales of the hardware https://www.statista.com/statistics/349048/nintendo-ds-software-unit-sales/ and compare it with basically any other device, that kind of drop is practically unprecedented, and it's certainly not because the hardware stopped selling. They sold 27m more units of the DS in 2010 and yet software sales dropped almost 25%.

And despite that, Pokemon also only managed to go blow to blow in the end with the DS games because pokemon go revitalised the series sales and pushed a lot of extra units surprisingly later in the consoles life.



You vastly underestimate just how widespread DS piracy was. There's a reason nintendo dropped software support for the DS faster than they did literally any other handheld, despite it being their most successful device ever at the time.
Click to expand...
Those are good points, however there probably was also a lot of overlapping between DS and Wii owners when it comes to core Nintendo players, so it's hard to say if those added that many extra players, more considering how many Wii players were also purely casual players.

When it comes to the piracy point I do agree it was definitely a big deal, it's mostly that it's very hard to point how many of the lost sales were because of it, especially if the DS apparently wasn't as popular among developing countries where most of those sales come from compared to the PSP, it's a point where there is no strong data to say if the 3DS lost 5 million or 30 million.
 
Last edited:
Just to add to the first party list of games in the OP, Fire Emblem Awakening on 3DS sold somewhere between 3 and 4 times as many copies as Shadow Dragon on DS. It revitalised a series that was close to going dormant, and opened up the gates for the series ever since. Now, admittedly, that wasn’t down to the 3DS audience specifically, it was more down to a boost in production values and offering non-permadeath and easier difficulty options to sell the story elements to players previously put off by those elements.

Monster Hunter did a lot of work on 3DS too, between 3U, 4U, Generations and stories.

I’d agree with the general premise that the audience was still there on 3DS, but that a huge amount of the ‘blue ocean’ audience on DS decamped to the App Stores where they could get puzzle games and general lifestyle ‘check in every day’ games for free. I mean, mobile is a reasonable fit for such portable games anyway. I remember I used to have tons of relatively simple DS games that I’d now use a mobile for.
 
PixelKnight said:
Just to add to the first party list of games in the OP, Fire Emblem Awakening on 3DS sold somewhere between 3 and 4 times as many copies as Shadow Dragon on DS. It revitalised a series that was close to going dormant, and opened up the gates for the series ever since. Now, admittedly, that wasn’t down to the 3DS audience specifically, it was more down to a boost in production values and offering non-permadeath and easier difficulty options to sell the story elements to players previously put off by those elements.

Monster Hunter did a lot of work on 3DS too, between 3U, 4U, Generations and stories.

I’d agree with the general premise that the audience was still there on 3DS, but that a huge amount of the ‘blue ocean’ audience on DS decamped to the App Stores where they could get puzzle games and general lifestyle ‘check in every day’ games for free. I mean, mobile is a reasonable fit for such portable games anyway. I remember I used to have tons of relatively simple DS games that I’d now use a mobile for.
Click to expand...
mobile is now dominanted by Gacha games lol
 
PixelKnight said:
Just to add to the first party list of games in the OP, Fire Emblem Awakening on 3DS sold somewhere between 3 and 4 times as many copies as Shadow Dragon on DS. It revitalised a series that was close to going dormant, and opened up the gates for the series ever since. Now, admittedly, that wasn’t down to the 3DS audience specifically, it was more down to a boost in production values and offering non-permadeath and easier difficulty options to sell the story elements to players previously put off by those elements.
Click to expand...
Something else that isn't talked about enough: Awakening's demo. That's the only reason why I even knew it existed back then.
 
ILovethegameAC said:
However I have heard a lot of people from markets with a lot of piracy like Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, South Asia and South East Asia that the DS was extremely niche there while hacked PSP's dominated
Click to expand...
That is actually not the case, at least for South and Southeast Asia. The DS was by far the more popular system, to the point that you could walk into any random shop or mall and buy an R4 cart loaded with 100+ games on the cheap. It was relatively more difficult to get your PSP hacked.

ILovethegameAC said:
It is very shocking that these groups of casual players and very little kids accumulate for around 77 million of lost players though
Click to expand...
It just goes to show how large the silent majority is. The people that talk about video games on the internet are a small, small slice of the pie.
 
meatbag said:
That is actually not the case, at least for South and Southeast Asia. The DS was by far the more popular system, to the point that you could walk into any random shop or mall and buy an R4 cart loaded with 100+ games on the cheap. It was relatively more difficult to get your PSP hacked.


It just goes to show how large the silent majority is. The people that talk about video games on the internet are a small, small slice of the pie.
Click to expand...
Mhhh, the thing is that I have read plenty of comments, mostly from India, Indonesia and the Phillipines, saying that they had never seen a DS in their life and they knew a lot of people with hacked PSP. Idk, maybe in Thailand or Malaysia things were different, and the 3 I mentioned before are big ass countries so maybe depending on the region things were different.

Here in Latin America both the DS and PSP were pretty popular if pirated and is tricky to say which one sold better, really depends on the country. At least here in Chile it was way easier to find original DS games in stores so there at least was a bit more market there. So it was very shocking to hear people saying that they never saw a DS at it's time.
 
Last edited:
OctoSplattack said:
Piracy was kinda ridiculous during that period. During the late 2000s, half the time I encountered someone with a DS, they were playing with a flash cart that had a ton of games on it, and every PSP had already been hacked to have a dozen emulators on it. Hell, the first time I saw a PSP in the wild was someone playing Super Mario 64 on it.
Click to expand...
Can confirm I had an R4 throughout the entirety of the DS era. Still have it actually.

Meanwhile I bought all of my 3DS games.
 
0
ILovethegameAC said:
Mhhh, the thing is that I have read plenty of comments, mostly from India, Indonesia and the Phillipines, saying that they had never seen a DS in their life and they knew a lot of people with hacked PSP
Click to expand...
I am from the Philippines and this was certainly not the case! DS was humongous here, far, far more than the PSP. Everyone in my high school, and the surrounding areas, had a DS.
 
0
You must log in or register to reply here.


Back
Top Bottom