the drop was fast true, but they always have a 5 year life span for consoles. its their bussines strategy, and it worked out perfectly with the Wii. yeah yeah nintendo should stop making consoles, nintendo should stop making hardware and go third party, heard all of it before. how about they just quit the gaming indusrty and go into the home cleaning industry? i mean they are just making a lot of money with video games. why the hell should they continue?

I don't think a big sales drop 2 years before your next system launches is a marketing strategy.

And why would they quit the industry? Their handhelds sell well. It's only their consoles that don't (unless they can fluke it like with the WiiU).

Actually it's only really the GameCube (and the N64 to a lesser extent) which sold relatively poorly, but still made Nintendo plenty of profit. 

The N64 sold 33M. Yeah, that's bad for a console. At 40M, I don't think the NES did great either but that was before the PS came out and brought gaming out of the "toy" category.

Well yeah, exactly. Playstation had its time in the spotlight in the PS1/PS2 era, and it just decimated the competition (so Sega, Microsoft and Nintendo all looked to be doing poorly in comparison), but when you compare the other Nintendo consoles, you see that they're always the best selling console, before the Sony era that is. So you can only judge success on how you do relatively to other people. So doing 70mil this gen would be considered "poor", but doing that a decade ago would be a great success. 

As such, only the Gamecube underperformed, and the N64 was right on the verge.

its called sarcasm in case you havent noticed

and sales of the Wii were only bad last year. in 2011 it did 11.5 million. the last year nintendo stopped supporting their console with games to make support the 3DS and WiiU. so its only reasonable that the sales of the console would drop further. so yeah, it is a marketing business strategy to stop supporting it and as a result would drop further

Well, if you want to compare within gens, the N64 sold less than 30% of what the PS sold so it's safe to say it underperformed.

The Wii did well thanks to the casuals (it'll still finish 2nd this gen though).

Starting with the SNES, every Nintendo home console, prior to the Wii, underperformed compared to its predecessor.

NES ~60 million
SNES ~50 million
N64 ~34 million
GC ~ 22 million

I wonder where the Wii U will be on that list.

ive been thinking the same thing, it obviously wont do Wii numbers but i doubt GC/N64 numbers as well. I personally believe it will sell in the 50 million range so around NES/SNES

Around the NES I'd have to guess, somewhere between 50 and 70mil depending on the length of the gen and price of their competitors.