Nintendo Sees ‘Huge’ Holiday Sales Looming For 3DS, Lead Engineer Says

Nintendo thinks “it’s really hard not to be incredibly excited” about the 3DS, “so there was huge anticipation it was going to be a blockbuster product,” Rabin said. “The initial hardcore gamers and early adopters absolutely bought one on day one. But I think the wider market was looking for the games, the wide slate of games, the must-have games that will make them want to buy the device.” Nintendo’s price cut this summer “takes away another barrier to purchasing the 3DS,” he said.

Nintendo has high hopes for the device in the holiday selling season, sparked in part by the scheduled November release of Super Mario 3D Land, a “brand new original Mario game, an absolute must-have,” Rabin said. Right after the price cut, 3DS sales in the U.S. jumped 260 percent, he said. “What’s even more important to understand is that the game industry makes the bulk of its sales during the holiday season, and it’s even more true for the portables space. So we really expect Christmas to be fairly huge for the 3DS.” Nintendo’s biggest challenge is getting the 3DS “in front of people” to see, he said. Rabin refused to answer when asked if Nintendo plans to introduce the Wii U with “3D support” when it debuts in 2012.

Nintendo doesn’t see the 3DS as competing against games on smartphones and other glasses-free 3D-capable mobile devices, Rabin said. “Games on mobile devices are more bite-size,” he said. “They're smaller and you spend smaller time periods playing them. The 3DS -- these are deeper games, we have dedicated controls for them. It’s a different market.” Another “distinction” is that touchscreen phones leave smudges that can muck up the 3D effect, while the 3DS doesn’t use a touchscreen for 3D game play, he said.

Independent game developer Kris Roberts, a former game designer at Rockstar Games, bought a Nintendo 3DS as soon as it became available but had a somewhat less enthusiastic reaction to the product than Rabin described as typical for a 3DS user, he told the conference. Roberts had “some very satisfactory gaming experiences” on the 3DS, he said. “In the small form factor where there’s a single user, a parallax-barrier approach for autostereoscopic works pretty satisfactorily,” Roberts said. “But in my initial 3DS playing, there was a little bit of a challenge to overcome my initial urge to do body English while I'm playing the game, which disturbed the stereo and is a little bit fragile in that autostereoscopic sense.” Roberts hasn’t seen “an autostereoscopic, glasses-free large display that I think is going to compete for my theater space, but I certainly see it as having a place in mobile,” he said.

The jury is out whether consumers will embrace glasses-free 3D in all but the smallest devices, agreed Andrew Fear, senior product manager at Nvidia, which worked with Toshiba to develop a Qosmio laptop with a glasses-free 3D screen. “We find that there are some users out there who for their use, taste, what’s important to them is glasses-free 3D. They may play that for some period of time,” he said. “I think we kind of have to watch and see what happens as to how long they're going to get the enjoyment out of 3D."

For a 3DS or other portable or handheld 3D “platform,” it’s possible to “get a great experience because the pixel density is a little bit smaller,” Fear said. “As you move up in size for notebooks and desktop monitors, we sometimes find some gamers are wanting a higher-fidelity experience just because you've got more interaction with text.” Fear thinks “it remains to be seen” where glasses-free 3D will go in the market, he said. “We're happy to work with Toshiba on their line and we're working with them to help enable gaming on it.”