How does Nintendo manage to do it so often

[Gamerace]

I've mentioned this before but Nintendo has a different yard stick than everyone else. A 1-2m seller isn't a success to Nintendo. They are not trying to make games that sell in that amount.

Look at the top selling games of all time, Nintendo practically owns the top 30 with GTA and maybe GT being the only non-Nintendo titles. Nor is Nintendo's success from this generation alone.

Nintendo looks to make games that sell in the double-digits of millions. That's a successful game to Nintendo. In order to sell that well a game must appeal to a wide audience and that's the one thing Nintendo consistantly does that no one else in the business does, makes games for everyone, not one particular subset of 'gamers'. Of course Nintendo has it's Zelda's and Metroids which have their followings and are pretty much guaranteed to make money but they are not really Nintendo's bread and butter.

Nintendo has said how they succeed many times: They have a small group work on an idea for months or even years until they really nail the addictive fun factor of the idea and then they build a game around that then polish it like crazy. PopCap does the same.
Everyone else goes for 'cool, epic' and then tries to shoehorn the fun in. Or they find something fun and make a game without taking the time to really find that addictive quality of the idea or polish it enough. Games like De Blob and Boom Blox come to mind.
Or they just copy what's already working (yet another FPS).

It's all in finding the addictiveness of the fun. Look at WoW and CoDMW. Neither did anything novel or new but they found what made their genres really addictively fun, and focused on that, built the epicness around the gameplay and polished, polished, polished.

Nintendo just does that as a matter of course.