On 11 December, GfK-ChartTrack released new data indicating that the Nintendo DS was the biggest selling games console in the UK ever. Weighing in at 10.05 million lifetime sales against its predecessor the PS2's 10.02 million, this seems all the more impressive when you take into account that the PS2 was released over nine years ago and the DS has been on the market for a meagre five.
It is now estimated that one in six people in the UK own a DS, some of them owning more than one. This is a remarkable figure even taking that into account and even more so if we cast our glance back to 2004 when the DS arrived on the scene.
The DS' arrival was not heralded to great fanfare by the gaming community. It was hailed as clunky - cheap looking, plastic and ugly. Its use of dual viewing screens and a stylus, by then seen as the outmoded peripheral of yore for PDAs only, was subject to huge criticism. It's safe to say that no one imagined that five years later it would be dominating the console market, but it has, and this is due in no small part to its user friendly hardware. Those of us brought up on a diet of games find this concept difficult to understand, but most non-gamers are immediately turned off of consoles and handhelds because of the controls. A traditional controller set up, particularly in handhelds, is not intuitive or welcoming which causes a barrier when a company looks to attract new customers - a revelation we have recently heard repeated at E3 with the introduction of Project Natal.
The DS made gaming simple by breaking it into three simple steps: pick up the stylus, touch the screen with it, play. No learning fiddly controls - no bumpers, no triggers, no joypads, no analog sticks and most importantly no confusing and frightening button combinations. You have one peripheral and one input device, the screen, and that's it. This painted a much more approachable picture to the casual and non- gamers and, most importantly, young children who make up a large part of Nintendo's target market with the DS. The cheap and plastic look that was mocked by the gaming community to begin with seemed playful and fun to others.
It wasn't just the hardware that proved attractive - Nintendo came out with a slew of different titles that seemed to bridge every gap and fill every niché market imaginable. These titles challenged everything we knew about handheld gaming, with titles such as Brain Training and Cooking Mama designed to educate as well as entertain. The DS could be use as an e-book reader and a study aid as well as play fun and interesting gaming titles such as the Professor Layton series and The Sims. This opened the device up to a market that its competitors just couldn't access by becoming an acceptable and often encouraged part of people's every day lives.
This device broke apart the very definition of "game" and as such our characterization of what a "gamer" is. Hardcore gamers, who grew up on a regimen of Quake and Wolfenstein may scoff, scowl and mock, spitting venom at the casual gamers who dare liken themselves to what they perceive a gamer to be without realising times have changed. In most people's eyes there is no difference between a man who plays Professor Layton for three hours a day on his commute home from work and one who spends the same amount of time on World of Warcraft in the evenings. The growth in uptake of the DS, along with that of the Nintendo Wii, should highlight to gamers that the gap between "us" and "them" is ever shrinking. We were wrong to laugh at the DS - we were out of touch with the way our world was changing then and if we continue to box ourselves in then this is the way it will stay. More than ever, we need to accept that we are no longer a minority unless we make ourselves one - we need to face that are just another niche in an ever expanding and changing market and find common ground.
Game of Peggle anyone?
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