While making a thread earlier, I stumbled across a trend that I hadn't paid much attention to before. So I put all the Nintendo home console sales data into a graph and here's what we have:
It seems that Nintendo's home console sales have been on a steady decline ever since the NES up to GC. The Wii came along and massively broke that trend.
But if we were to take the Wii sales figure out of the above chart and considered it an anomaly, the current Wii U sales number tracking behind GC for the same period of time they've been out on the market (Wii U=6.25, GC=9.55) would actually fit the above trend quite nicely. This was noted by Seece in his recent thread where it was argued that Wii U may not end up catching up to GC in lifetime sales (http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=182183), which again would fit the above trend if Wii is not included.
Now I understand that there are a lot of parameters that affect a video game console sales such as competition from other consoles, and the Wii U could end up outselling the GC, but the decline in Nintendo's home console sales from NES to GC is apparent. One could argue that the Wii tapped into a different audience altogether (the casuals) and hence it broke the trend, an audience that does not seem to be returning thus far. It seems though that the Wii U is now back to following the trend the past Nintendo consoles have followed and hence its sales may have been something we should have expected.
Is there any particular reason for this decline in Nintendo's console sales? How does the Wii fit into all this? Also, what does this mean about Nintendo's future? Yours thoughts?
