In the past two months, Nintendo 3DS, the popular last-gen handheld console, is having a second wind in China two years after ceasing production. The price of a good used unit has soared up to around 220 USD(~1450 CNY) on the second-hand market, a 20% leap in a very short amount of time.
This new trend is caused mainly by Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, a social media and e-commerce platform similar to Instagram in many ways. According to a report, 90% of Xiaohongshu users were female, and 83.31% were 18-34 years old.
A screenshot on Xiaohongshu shows a player sharing their most recommended games.
Many of these new 3DS enthusiasts are very casual gamers who don’t play any console games before 3DS. They are attracted to this classic handheld console for its cute design, small form factor, and the giant library of sweet and lighthearted ones, like Kirby, Pokémon, and Animal Crossing. Games that have well-designed character portraits like Ace Attorney or Fire Emblem Awakening were frequently mentioned as well.
Pink and red models are the hottest and exceptionally expensive to acquire. This new wave of 3DS owners would also love to decorate their consoles with all kinds of cute stickers and gadgets.
Since most of the consoles had hacked firmware or OS, making it relatively easy to have hundreds of games for free, even if the owner doesn’t know much about hacking or programming. We do not endorse console hacking, but this availability inspired a heated discussion about old 3DS and NDS games, allowing many forgotten classics back into the eyes of today’s Chinses gamers.
A screenshot on a price-tracking website shows the price of an e-store's New 3DS LL has risen from 1240 to 1441 CNY in the last two months.
Nintendo sold more than 75 million 3DS units worldwide and only ceased its production in 2020. There is still an abundance of good 3DS lying around, and the price surge shouldn’t last very long. However, how new generations of players are taking interest in the older generation of consoles and games will always be an interesting thing to look at.