When did the Nintendo 3ds Release and how much did it sell
Executive summary
The Nintendo 3DS launched in early 2011—debuting in Japan on February 26, 2011 and rolling out to Europe, North America and Australia in late March 2011—and went on to sell roughly 75.9–76.0 million hardware units worldwide over its lifetime according to Nintendo and industry aggregators [1] [2] [3].
1. Release timeline: a staggered worldwide rollout
Nintendo announced and shipped the 3DS in a staggered schedule: the handheld first reached Japan on February 26, 2011 (¥25,000 at launch), then arrived in Europe on March 25, 2011, North America on March 27, 2011, and Australia on March 31, 2011, establishing the early‑2011 window that most contemporary accounts reference [1].
2. Early market turbulence and company response
Initial sales were weaker than Nintendo expected, prompting a substantial summer price cut from US$249.99 to US$169.99 less than six months after launch and an “Ambassador” compensation program of free eShop titles for early buyers—moves reported at the time as necessary responses to sluggish uptake and criticism about the console’s launch lineup and pricing [1].
3. Lifetime hardware sales: Nintendo’s official tally and industry totals
Nintendo’s investor relations lists lifetime hardware sales for the 3DS at approximately 75.94 million units, with software lifetime sales of roughly 392.29 million units—figures presented as worldwide consolidated life‑to‑date totals on Nintendo’s site [2]. Independent industry data compiled by Statista echoes that scale, reporting about 75.95 million units worldwide as of October 2024, with nearly 21 million sold in Europe according to the Statista summary [3].
4. Regional performance and peak years
The 3DS peaked in annual sales around 2013—the platform’s high point—after which yearly hardware shipments declined, with Nintendo reporting only 170,000 units sold in the fiscal year ending March 2021 versus 690,000 the year before, illustrating the console’s long tail of modest sales late in its life [4]. Early localized successes included roughly 4.5 million U.S. units in the first year after the March 27, 2011 launch there, a figure Nintendo and trade outlets highlighted as evidence the platform recovered after its rocky opening [5].
5. Variants, revisions and how they factor into totals
The 3DS family expanded to include the 3DS XL, the New Nintendo 3DS (launched in Japan October 11, 2014) and later the 2DS and New 2DS XL; Nintendo’s consolidated figures count all these variants within the 3DS hardware total, which explains why single‑model sales breakdowns from hobbyist trackers and regional databases vary substantially from Nintendo’s global consolidated number [6] [2] [7].
6. Conflicting sources and the limits of public counts
Publicly available tallies differ by outlet—Nintendo’s IR pages provide the official consolidated totals [2], Statista aggregates industry data and reports similar totals with regional splits [3], while third‑party sites like VGChartz and community wikis publish variant or region‑specific figures that can diverge because of methodology, time of access, or whether they separate variants; those differences underline that “how much it sold” can mean different things depending on whether one cites Nintendo’s consolidated life‑to‑date hardware figure or variant/region estimates from independent trackers [8] [9] [7].
7. Bottom line
The simplest, defensible statement from available reporting is that the Nintendo 3DS launched in Japan on February 26, 2011 and in late March 2011 for Europe, North America and Australia, and that Nintendo’s consolidated lifetime hardware sales for the 3DS family sit at roughly 75.94–75.95 million units worldwide, with software sales in the hundreds of millions also reported by Nintendo [1] [2] [3].