Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 7th Jan 2013 19:01 UTC
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RE[3]: Comment by lucas_maximus
by zima on Sat 12th Jan 2013 21:06
in reply to "RE[2]: Comment by lucas_maximus"
There is perhaps another success story - really dedicated handheld tetris consoles (like this one http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brick_Game.png ). Do we count those?
Pricing definitely played a role in their uptake (basically an order of magnitude less expensive than even Gameboy) ..."unfortunately" they were cloned all over the place, came from many small manufacturers, so nobody was keeping count of the total numbers sold (of nearly identical units, really).
As far as personal anecdotes go: they were much more popular than Gameboy at least in some of the less affluent areas (Central Europe in my case - so that's still relatively prosperous, there are many less affluent places)
Edited 2013-01-12 21:08 UTC




Member since:
2006-01-24
IIRC the NeoGeo was huge in the east. I've never used one though, so couldn't comment on it's performance / hardware.
Not so sure that the home console version was ever huge even in the east, in the arcades the Neo Geo did very well but the system was very expensive for home users.
As for the handhelds, I think it's mainly a question of Nintendo having an iron grip on that market more than the pricing.
Back when the Gameboy ruled we had Bandai trying to aggressively compete with the Wonderswan and later the Wonderswan Color, SNK with the Neo Geo Pocket/Neo Geo Pocket Color which were as I recall, priced competitively, but to no avail.
The PSP is probably the only success story in handheld consoles that didn't come from Nintendo and it's obviously still nowhere near the DS. PSP Vita was off to a very slow start but seems to be picking up, 3DS is way ahead though.
Here are the japanese hardware sales for 2012 and the total sold (again, in Japan):
Nintendo 3DS: 5,727,763 units (total 9,762,502 units)
Nintendo DS: 286,270 units (total 32,864,129 units)
PSP: 941,992 units (total 19,179,100 units)
PS Vita: 674,365 units (total 1,077,159 units)
Wii U: 638,339 units (total 638,339 units)
Wii: 492,999 units (total 12,667,420 units)
PS3: 1,327,185 units (total 8,744,333 units)
Xbox 360: 67,273 units (total 1,588,011 units)
Of course the big problem for the dedicated handheld console is the increasing competition from smartphones/pads.