Chris, from VideoGame News, looks at the numbers to realize that only about 10% of DS owners have actually played online.
Figures recently released by Nintendo suggest that only 1 in 10 of DS owners take their hand-held gaming online. Around 30 million DS consoles have been sold and 3.5 million unique users have used the online service. There have been approximately 100 million connections to the service since it started so that’s only around 3 online gaming sessions per unique user!
To me, that seems horrendously low, especially when Nintendo made the process of getting online as easy as possible. So what could be causing the low figures? Lack of good online games? Lots of households without wireless internet? Or maybe people just like playing on their own?
I’m not sure on the figures for the PSP online service (I can’t imagine it being much higher) but compared to regular consoles it compares badly with around 30-40% of 360 & Wii owners using the equivalent service.
While I own a couple of Wi-Fi Connection enabled DS games, and while I’ve played them online, I’m not much of an online gamer. I guess most of the online games out there aren’t really games that keep me playing consistently, but everyone has different tastes. Hopefully, some new kinds of online games will be on the horizon.
