The Nintendo 3DS, more like the Nintendo £DS.

Figures coming out of Japan today show that the Nintendo 3DS has set another sales record. This one is relating to the time it has taken for the machine to sell through five million units. The previous record was held by the DS at 56 weeks and before that the GBA at 58 weeks. According to Japanese site Adriasang the 3DS managed the feat in just 52 weeks.

It has certainly been some turn-around for Nintendo’s latest handheld. Only a few months ago experts were lining up to declare that the handheld market had moved on, that Apple’s way of doing things was what customers preferred, and that game-orientated handhelds were doomed. A price-cut and a deluge of great titles later and the 3DS is consistently breaking sales records–shows how much the supposed experts know.

Personally I never subscribed to the belief that the public were happy playing games on their phones and were not looking for a dedicated portable games machine. After all while Apple and Android were having a great deal of success in the download market, whilst smartphones were flying off the shelves and Angry Birds was being downloaded over 200 million times, people were still buying DS consoles and games. So it wasn’t like the market for a DS style handheld had disappeared.

There is also the fact that the 3DS wasn’t really a failure when it was launched. Between the launch of the system on the 26^th of February and September 30^th the console shifted 6.68m units compared to the original DS, which managed 6.65m over the same timeframe. The trouble was that due to the massive subsequent sales of the DS the 3DS was always going to be judged unfairly. It’s the same problem that the successor to the Wii will no doubt have. It is very rare for a console to launch and then reach the kind of numbers that the Wii and the DS were doing during their height. It is accepted fact that it takes a couple of years before a console reaches its sales peak. With the 3DS it seems that the industry expected it to be a blockbuster out of the gate and when it wasn’t they were quick to call it a failure.

True, Nintendo did make some mistakes with the launch, chief of which was that it didn’t have a great slate of games available for it, but then that has been true of most console launches. More importantly was that they didn’t manage to get across the message to the public that this was a new console rather than just another DS with 3D added. The price was also probably a little off; they perhaps should have sold it for around £229.99, but I’m not sure it was such a significant factor.

I do think though that the media were too quick to jump on the 3DS and call it a failure and this is a problem with our media as a whole. Nothing is given time anymore. You have to be able to launch and be an instant success, if you don’t then prepare to be called a failure, something which quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy–as no-one buys your machine as they think it is a failure due to what the press has said. This puts incredible pressure on anyone looking to launch a new product, be it a home console or a handheld system. Expectations are being set way too high and when those expectations aren’t hit the condemnation is swift and vicious. It’s damaging to the industry and something that needs to change.

I’m glad that Nintendo were able to prove the doomsayers wrong, but it was only their deep pockets that allowed them to combat the negative press with a sharp price-cut that was able to combat the furore over whether the console was a failure. Without that pressure from the press I think the 3DS would have gone on to have a good Christmas and going into 2012 would have been able to follow the traditional path of a console launch and reduce its price accordingly. All the press managed to do was push that chain forward a bit and make themselves look silly in the process.

Next time I think we should wait before pronouncing the death of a product, especially a Nintendo one. You would have thought that the media would have learned their lesson after what was said about the original DS and Wii when they were first announced. However it seems whilst the media is quite prepared to make swift judgements, it’s a little slower when it comes to learning from its mistakes.