Worldwide, 3DS is ahead of where DS was at the end of 2005.
So I'm noticing a bit of a regional shift. On the whole, Europe was the strongest market for DS.
However, in the cases of DSi, DSiXL, and now 3DS, Europe was initially ahead of North America but fell behind.
So for years I have been saying "There are more Wiis available than any near-launch home console ever.", though "near-launch" has become increasingly stretched. While this is still true, it's been apparent for a while that it would eventually fall behind PS2. However, now it looks like Wii has slowed down enough that it won't get the chance to be "Fastest to 100 million.", barring some price cut boost in the next few quarters. However, this is comparing to Sony's old shipment reporting methods, so there's a bit of gray area.
You know, looking over this again, the 2 million 3DS hardware drop was less than I expected
However, lowering software by 24 million is what really sticks out to me.
I think saying they dropped by 24 is a bit oversimplified. That's the change from the beginning of the year, but that forecast has been all over the place. It went from 62 to 70 (which seemed crazy when the system was performing worse than expected) to 50 to now 38. I think only the 50 to 38 drop is really relevant as a surprise now. I mean, considering how slow hardware sales were early on of course they were always going to miss that 62. But they must have expected software over October-December software to be much bigger than it ended up being.
Jonnyram said:
They revised 3DS down to 14M, so they still have 2.5M to sell in the last quarter to reach that.
Considering it's traditionally a slow quarter, I think this basically confirms a revised 3DS before FY end.
I think you're just underestimating the norm. Here's what DS's worldwide shipments were January-March quarters.
2005: 2.43M
2006: 2.30M
2007: 4.68M
2008: 5.81M
2009: 5.56M
2010: 3.76M
2011: 1.83M