Smash Bros and Mario Kart and Zelda and 3D Mario are only going to take you 30-40 million users, but they'll sell a lot individually.
If Nintendo wants to get beyond that they need something new to break out. That's the big question. Not these franchises. We already have seen this script before.
The Wii had Wii Sports and Wii Fit that brought in millions upon millions of lapsed gamers/soccer moms/women/non-gamers/seniors/party console types.
The NES had tons of third party support like Megaman, Contra, Final Fantasy, Ninja Turtles, etc.
The SNES had Donkey Kong Country (Rare cometh), Star Fox (3D polygons), Street Fighter II, and the best 16-bit version of Mortal Kombat II.
What's the Wii U got outside of the same 4 or 5 Nintendo franchises that are on every Nintendo console? That's the question right now.
Even the N64 had GoldenEye come out of nowhere and become a monster hit and establish the FPS genre on the home console definitively. That game carried that system until Zelda was ready, but without it, who knows, the N64 very well might've ended up with 25-27 million instead of the 33 million userbase it sold.
