Why is Nintendo winning the handheld war?

[zorg1000]

Soundwave said:

mountaindewslave said:

3DS possibly going to sell similarly to the GBA which kind of discounts what you've said there about 'losing a chunk of their market'. of course they were going to lose a chunk of the DS market, that was an anamoly not the norm

Nintendo makes great handheld games. its as simple as that. most of the people I know who have purchased 3DS's actually did not do so for Pokemon, they did it for Mario, Zelda, Animal Crossing, Fire Emblem, Smash Bros, etc. lots of high quality games for the system

GBA had 3 years before the DS was released to succeed it, 3DS will need 6 years probably to get to 80 million at this rate (I'm not even sure if it ever will to be honest). 

This is like saying "well we both finished a 1 KM race, so we're both equal" ... yeah ... not if I finished it in half the time you did. 

The interesting thing is that America is the only region to show a massive decline from GBA to 3DS. Here is 2001-2004 & 2011-2014.

Japan

GBA-15.48 vs 3DS-18.70

Americas

GBA-32.82 vs 3DS-16.77

Others

GBA-17.44 vs 3DS-14.93

So Japan is slightly up, Others is slightly down and Americas is massively down. I'm pretty sure mobile is pretty huge in Europe/Japan so I'm not sure we can put the blame solely on mobile.