It's not really important how many consoles the 3DS has sold. If those who own one are happy with it and haven't gotten brain tumours yet, then all is good. Unfortunately though in the society we live in, we're obsessed with facts and figures, successes and failures. Obviously there's a serious side to the popularity of the 3DS, if it does prove to be an under achiever less developers will be likely to bring out games on it, they'll be less chance of a 3DS II and Nintendo's reputation and shares will take a wobble; ultimately though stories like this are written so haters can have a good chuckle and fan boys can feel smug.
But should we laugh or cheer? The impact of the 3DS has proved particularly hard to measure. Following my accusations of a launch 'flop' much commotion was created. (That story focused on poor software sales.) Then I followed the story with 'Was the 3DS a success or not?' This post looked at the fact that pre-order figures and actual sale figures were out of sync due to multiple pre-orders by people price hunting. It also brought up the point that we can measure the 3DS against its precursors (i.e. the original DS/DSi) from this angle, the 3DS was a big success, but against its rival the PSP, its launch was weak.
So here I am at the third instalment of the story and at last it seems we can now clarify the issue. Nintendo predicted 4 million 3DS sales in the first month (worldwide) and they reached 3.6 million consoles. Some folk would disagree, but for me that's a success. We can leave it at that until the end of the financial year, by which point Nintendo expects to sell 16m 3DS consoles worldwide and 62m units of software. At the moment they are on track. So they aren't smashing their estimates, but at least they're keeping near them.