December 9^th, 2004 (12:11pm) - Earlier today Nintendo announced that the company would be increasing its Nintendo DS shipments for the holiday season by 40 percent. In addition, Nintendo Co. Ltd. President Satoru Iwata once again commented on the PlayStation Portable, which launches in just a few days on the 12th of December.

Iwata believes that the PlayStation Portable will fail to attract newcomers to gaming. Unsurprisingly, he believes the Nintendo DS is doing just that, citing that young women who usually don’t play videogames now are, thanks to the NDS and its dual screen and touch panel features. Additionally, he believes that providing a powerful handheld machine with spectacular graphics will not guarantee success for that platform.

"PSP has been created with the assumption that the golden success formula is still working," he told reporters at the Foreign Correspondants’ Club. "We don’t believe that. We’re making every effort so that people will say we were right. We’re focusing on our market, ages 5 to 95 whereas Sony has decided to target a very specific demographic.”

Furthermore, Iwata once again stated that the consumers are drifting away from gaming due to the complexity found in most of today’s games. However, if one were to analyze sales data over the past few years, they would see that gaming is more popular now than it has ever been.

The PSP will launch in Japan this Sunday with a North American and PAL release coming in early 2005. The launch of the handheld is expected to be a grand one thanks to positive criticism received from Japanese game critics reviewing the handheld’s launch titles.