Nintendo DS is all-time Bestseller in US

Nintendo DS is all-time Bestseller in US

Nachiket Mhatre, Jan 05, 2011 1531 hrs IST

DS has pushed 47 million units to become the most sold console ever

The Xbox 360 and PS3 may be hogging all the limelight, but when it comes to pure numbers, they have nothing on Nintendo's DS portable console. The combined sales of all the iterations of the DS series of portables have hit 47 million units in the US. The DS, as you know, counts kids as its major demographic. That is an interesting figure, but what is even more interesting is the conclusion one can draw from that statistic.

According to a 2008 census, there are approximately 74 million children in the United States of America. Out of that, roughly 14 million kids are either in poverty, foster care, or experiencing child abuse and neglect. So it's safe to assume that these unfortunate children will not enjoy the luxury of a Nintendo DS portable system. Another 13 million kids suffer from some kind of disability, which takes the total number of children without access to Nintendo DS consoles to 27 million.

These numbers when subtracted from the total number of kids in the US, leaves us with 47 million kids, which is exactly the number of DS portables sold in the US. So statistically speaking, every normal kid in America owns a Nintendo DS.

Conversely, if you are a kid in the US and do not own a DS console, you're either disabled, abused, neglected, poor or in foster care, which satisfies at least three of those conditions. Then again, statistics being statistics cannot be taken at face value. That still doesn't take anything away from the success of Nintendo's portable console, which has proven to be a platform of choice for those into stop-gap portable gaming.