A lot of comparisons have been made lately to the Virtual Boy due to the recent price drop. Yes, both systems slashed their prices after less than half a year. And no, this doesn’t look particularly good for the Virtual Boy heading into a fight with the Vita, the primary reason the price was cut. But I still can’t help to note some pretty large differences.
There are real problems with the 3DS, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t put them on par with the Virtual Boy. The VB was awesome in many respects, being the first to market with 3D graphics being the main thing. But it also had some stellar games, people just couldn’t get past the red/black monochrome. Red was an odd choice. It was kind of expensive at launch being at $170, more than twice the amount that the Game Boy sold at launch. But the VB only shipped 800,000 units in its life, which 3DS surpassed within its first month. Also, the VB just wasn’t even a portable which also put it into an odd placement. It wasn’t really a console it wasn’t really portable, people didn’t know what to do with it.
I actually would compare the 3DS quite directly with the DS itself. In fact, when they started talking about it, I was amazed by how much they sounded like they were copying the DS formula. In fact, I compared the totals of sales for each system, After 5 months the DS sold about 5.25 million units, the 3DS sold about 4.3 milllion units. No it is not doing as well as the DS, but it isn’t that far off, about a million. I think the real difference is in the games being sold for each where I think DS by far outsold the 3DS when it came to games.
But I look at the launch games of each system and I really do see similarities there. The DS was actually known for having not many great games at launch. I think that it took about a year before the DS really started seeing a lot of games, and probably another year before we started seeing some high quality games. At launch, both the DS & 3DS had sims, madden, and Asphalt. DS launched with an updated version of Mario 64 and then Nintendogs a few months later. 3DS launched with Nintendogs and then an updated version of the N64 Zelda. (Two key differences here is that they added little to Nintendogs and though Zelda is a better game, I think Mario is liked by a wider audience.) The 3DS I actually feel like has overall better launch titles. The DS didn’t have anything to the Caliber of Street Fighter IV, or even Pilotwings for that matter. There is also a Ghost Recon, Monkey Ball, Rayman, and from what I’ve heard a really excellent Soccer game.
That being said, the launch lineup isn’t that great, I think it just shows how terrible the launch lineup was for the DS. And I also think people forget just how bad the DS was at launch when it comes to games.
The big huge giant mistake that Nintendo did make was price. This was actually a two-fold problem as well. One, the 3DS was $100 more expensive than the DS was at launch, and two games are more expensive as well. Even when Nintendo announced that the 3DS was going to be $250 I thought they were crazy. I could see it topping out at $200, with the stereoscopic screen, but at that cost in the middle of a recession, they were taking it out of the hands of a lot of potential players. And they are finally correcting that mistake.
However, the game cost still sticks around. I don’t think that is going away any day soon unfortunately. I think that the cost of the average 3DS game went up to $40 for an expensive game from $35 largely at the behest of developers whom they wanted to get more support from this time around (and I feel they have). I think the real downer though is that the DS had a bunch of even lower priced games. They basically had the hardcore price point of $35 and the casual price point between $20-25. I think this worked well. Heck I am pretty sure Nintendogs launched at $24.99 on the DS and on the 3DS it is a whopping $39.99. Again I could have seen an increase in price, but I think they needed a lower increase than what they did. I would have liked to see them come out with the same strategy but have the hardcore price of $35 to 40 and the casual price of $25 to 30. This way some of the less in depth games would seem more worth the price. (And I really feel that both Nintendogs and Zelda should have gone for a lower price than the blockbusters.)
The other major problem with the 3DS is battery life. Nintendo just should have known better. Battery life is 3-5 hours on the 3DS, half of the 6-10 that the original DS had. This is quite pitiful. Nintendo has consistently beaten other portables who forgot the lessons of battery life. Well this one doesn’t have any battery life, which coupled with price is not helping Nintendo any. They should have gotten the battery life under control and gotten it to at least a 4-8 range. I think most gamers would have rather had a longer battery life than the 2 GB of flash that they packed in with the system.
Is the 3DS in trouble? For sure. Is it doomed? Probably not. The DS had about a year and a half advance to beat the PSP, the 3DS only has about 8 months to beat the Vita. Had the PSP come out closer to the DS launch, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Nintendo lowered the price for it too. But things are looking good for the 3DS. The huge price drop will drive a lot of hardware sales, although I still don’t think the games are quite there for the software sales to spike though I think they will too.
More importantly the software line up for the rest of the year look stellar for the 3DS. Nintendo is bringing out the big guns to compete with the Vita. They have a new Mario Kart, Super Mario, Kid Icaris, Dragon Quest Monsters, Cave Story 3D, and Professor Layton (which was a system seller in Japan) coming up. They also have a number of remakes like Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater, Shinobi and Star Fox 64 that I think will be quite popular. Not to mention the return of Flip Note for the 3DS. With the addition of the Virtual Console to the eShop, I think they are in a good place. I just hope they can add the movies somehow to their system early next year as I think that was something promised originally that I personally was excited about.
For me, I was not going to get the 3DS this year. With the financial problems I’ve been having it wasn’t in the cards to get a $250 system. So I had decided on waiting until the 3DS Lite came out (which I am sure will be released next year if sales continue to struggle), which I am sure will be smaller and have a much better battery life. However, with the prospect of an $80 discount and 20 free games. I am likely to go out and buy the bad boy and then get it price adjusted a couple of weeks later. It is an offer I can’t refuse. I just likely won’t buy any games for it until later this year, which is kind of sad.