Put the DS and the PSP side by side on paper and the DS loses every line. Weaker processor. Lower resolution. Two small screens instead of one good one. No optical drive, no proper media playback, and a plastic shell that looks like a toy next to Sony’s slab of black glass.

It is outselling the PSP by something close to two to one and the gap is widening.

I wrote in November about the Wii skipping the specification race entirely, and this is the same argument with two years of evidence already attached. The DS did it first. Nintendo has now run the experiment twice and won both times, and the industry is still explaining the results as a fluke.

The mechanism is not the touchscreen as a feature. It is what the touchscreen removes.

Hand a modern controller to someone who has never held one and watch. Two sticks, a directional pad, four face buttons, four shoulder buttons, and a set of conventions about which does what that took the rest of us fifteen years to absorb without noticing we were absorbing anything. It is a genuinely difficult instrument, and the difficulty is invisible to everyone who already plays.

A stylus on a screen has no such barrier. You touch the thing you want. There is nothing to learn, so there is no moment of humiliation in front of a nephew, and that moment is what keeps most adults away from games.

Look at what is actually selling on the platform. Brain training exercises. A dog you look after. Cooking instructions. Crosswords. Sold in supermarkets, bought by people in their forties and fifties who would tell you sincerely that they do not play video games, and who are correct, because what they are doing does not resemble what the industry has spent twenty years making.

Sony built a beautiful machine for people who already play. Nintendo built an ugly one for people who do not. There are far more of the second group, and none of them care that the screen is 256 pixels wide.

What I would watch now is whether anyone else can follow. The instinct across the industry will be to copy the input method, because that is the visible part, and to keep making the same games for the same audience with a touchscreen bolted on. That will not work. The hard bit was being willing to ship weaker hardware and then commission software for people the industry does not employ, does not socialise with, and does not much respect.

Nintendo has done it twice in a row now. At some point that stops being luck.