Sales analysis: Family-friendly & casual series are losing their appeal on Nintendo platforms

[Mnementh]

Your examples are indeed interesting. but in my opinion you get the completely wrong conclusions from them.

Your exceptions are interesting though: Just Dance didn't shrink. it just sold on Wii, nearly the same as the previous installments. I'm somewhat confident, that if you count all versions of JD4 together (Wii, WiiU, PS3, X360) it is as big as the predecessors or even bigger. but still most of it sold on Wii. That shows: the people that were buying this game, WiiSports, WiiFit and so on haven't moved anywhere. They are still present and still buying games. I think Brain Age, Nintendogs and Art Academy would still sell well if offered for DS or Wii. But WiiU and 3DS weren't built for them. They have no reason to buy them. That also includes PS3 and 4 and X360 and One. Except Sony or Microsoft do something clever to get this folk.

I don't think NSMB and Mario Kart is bought by the same group of people. Mario Kart was sold well on all consoles. While people that never gamed before and don't want to learn something for having fun (the people most here call casuals) weren't buying Mario Kart on Gamecube or N64. And they weren't buying the old 2D-Marios on NES and SNES. That were sold to old-school gamers. Yes, they were present on Wii and DS too, but the main sales came from "casuals". While the 3DS and WiiU failed to cater to the needs of "casuals", the 3DS was successful in attracting the japanese main-gaming-community, the PSP-crowd and ... the old-school-gamers. So this explains the good sales of Mario Kart 7 and the moderate sales of NSMB2.