Pocket Gamer's big prediction; we've worked out when Nintendo will sell its 100 millionth DS

Yesterday Nintendo announced its financial figures for the nine months ending 31 December 2008. One of the headlines was the total install base of DS consoles was 96.22 million.

(Technically this figure is the number of DSs that Nintendo has shipped to retailers rather than the exact number that have been sold to people, but what the heck.)

So the big question is: when will the 100 millionth DS be sold?

We're sure Nintendo's PR department is working on a campaign to celebrate the event. Maybe it will involve an under-privileged kid from the Brazilian favelas, or a charming greying OAP from Boise, Idaho, or (and this is a good idea) a bright young Indian slumdog.

But what we want to know is precisely when that 100 millionth DS can be stacked up?

And so it is we've wound up the big Pocket Gamer calculator to work it out. We have great faith in our big calculator. It's only been wrong once, and that was when we asked when the end of the world would occur (tellingly, some 80 years before the date on which we performed the calculation.)

The question is a simple one: how long does it take to sell 3.78 million DSs?

To work this out, we crunched through the figures Nintendo has provided every three months about the number of DSs it has shipped.

It's interesting stuff (if you like numbers), and by this method it works out that Nintendo is selling almost exactly 2 million DSs every month. So the simple calculation is that it will take 1.89 months to sell those extra 3.78 million DSs.

This gives us a date of February 26th.

Hurray!

But what's this? A rival calculation!

If you break down the rate of sales of DSs in different territories - Japan, America and Europe - you get a different figure. Taking these assumptions (in Japan 17,300 DSs are sold every day, in the US it's 21,700 per day and in Europe it's 28,000 per day), we get the slightly changed figure that it will take 1.86 months to sell 3.78 million DSs.

This gives us the date of February 25th.

You see, these things matter.

But there's more. The most important thing to happen for the DS in recent months was the Japanese release of the DSi console in November 2008. Of course, this boosted Japanese DS sales, with 1.7 million being sold in two months. Factor that increased performance into our calculations and we get the answer of February 17th.

Of course, the current credit crunch might also affect things - probably slowing down DS sales, but maybe speeding them up (who knows?).

Something we will guarantee, however, is that when Nintendo announces its next set of financials in three months time, that 100 million barrier will have been breached. If it hasn't, the end of the world really will be upon us.