Nintendo setting company sales records, but what does that mean?
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Nintendo had it’s biggest week ever, selling 653,000 DS Lites, the all-time high for any console from the company, and 350,000 Wiis, second only to the week of launch.
My response is what did you expect? Of course it’s going to be more than they have ever sold for previous consoles. Video games, especially consoles, have only exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry since then, so it’s not like there’s a smaller pool of people to buy the things.
It’s like when movie companies break opening weekend records. Movies break these records because it costs twice as much to go to the movies as it did even 10 years ago, let alone the 50 years since some of the greatest movies have been released. In a similar, though admittedly slightly different way, video games are going to continuously break these records because they’re only going to get more popular. Of course, when they reach a certain point of saturation the record-breakings will come slower, but they will still happen for the same reason.
What’s more interesting are the relative records. What precentage of the population that plays video games bought a DS in this one week? If it’s more than the percentage of gamers that bought a NES when it was 3 years from it’s U.S. launch, then that’s something impressive and would certainly make me say it had broken some records.
Tags: DS, nes, nintendo, sales, wii, Wired
