Not to beat a dead horse, but I did a little research this morning on some of my points.
The Gameboy Advance was released in 2001 as well as the Gamecube. According to the chartz, the GBA alone (standard and SP model) sold 81.49m units while the Gamecube sold only 21.75m. Even with taking out the GBA:SP's 43.57m units, the GBA, a 6th gen handheld, handily beat it's 6th gen console counterpart in sales. The original GB has so many iterations and such a long life, I couldn't really find a good way to seperate it against individual generations.
Second, as far as a system needing to beat it's predessesor in order to be a success, they only problem with this is that sometimes outside forces make this nearly impossible, but not because of any shortcomings on the systems side. For instance, the SuperNintendo did not outsell the NES, but that can easily be due to the emergence of real competiton in the Genesis. To that same point, if/when the 3DS does not sell as much as the DS, it could be argued that the rise of mobile/iphone gaming(the Iphone was released 3 years after the DS), and Sony releasing their sophmore handheld (which hopefully they learned from past mistake and will be a very real competitor), could be just as big of factors as the 3DS hardware itself. Thoughts?
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