DSi XL

Between 100,000 and 104,000 Nintendo DSi XL units have been sold in the first week of release according to various sources. It is a strong start for the new console which especially as the focus of the advertising is non-casual gamers. Such high launch sales imply the console is also grabbing the attention of more tech savvy people keen to get their hands on it. More casual gamers are likely to pick the console up later in its product life. With casual gamers and hardcore supports, the DSi XL console is bound to be a big success.

These sales figures are considerably lower than the original DSi which sold a record breaking 170,000 in its week of release. This was completely expected though as it has only been a year since the last model of the console was released. In fact selling this many units is quite surprising. I wonder who bought these. Were these the same early adaptors that bought the previous model or people that saw the release of the new console as a good opportunity to upgrade? Probably a mixture of both. I doubt many of the older generation Nintendo seems to be marketing towards rushed out to buy the console on release day. I expect they will come to the console more gradually.

The previous model and the DS Lite’s sales don’t seem to be as affected by the release of the new console as you might expect. The DSi sold 32,000 units (only 1,500 less than last week, don’t these people know there is a new console on the market?). The DS Lite still sold over 5000 units despite being two generations old and it’s sales seem to be unaffected by the DSI XL release.

It’s been a week for handhelds as Sony’s PSP was the second best seller of the week though far behind with 37,000 sales over between the PSP Go and PSP-3000. PSP-3000 still pulled a fairly strong 33,000 sales while the PSP Go (still only 3 weeks old in Japan) saw its sales decreased by a third and managed only 4600 units.

Wii sales increased slightly to 33,000. PS3 faced a fall in sales but remained the most popular home console this week with 35,000. Far behind that was the Xbox 360 with 4000 sales which was only double the 10 year old PS2.