I wasn't talking about the types of games in my previous post, but the impact of individual titles. In other words, games that actually make people consider to buy the hardware. There's much more of them made for home consoles than handhelds. Remakes never reach the same sales level as a true sequel. The Imagine Series consists of dozens of different games and only a few of them crossed the million mark which isn't that big in this day and age of multimillion sellers.

Does anyone care that Santa Monica isn't doing Ghost of Sparta? Probably not, because as you said, most people don't know the actual developer of a specific game. But the PSP GoW aren't full entries in the series, they are merely sidestories. As a result they don't have the same impact as the home console games, not in software sales and also not in hardware moving capabilities. That's the problem handhelds in general are facing: they usually don't get the big games and the majority of gamers tends to go where the big games are. A quick example: Final Fantasy remakes on the DS sell okay, but Dragon Quest IX makes Japan go bonkers.

Handhelds have the advantage to sell to two or more people in the same household, yes. That's why they should routinely beat the home consoles in each generation in sales, right? But that didn't happen, so the great imbalance between handhelds and home consoles when it comes to big games has definitely been a huge advantage for home consoles in the past. A bigger advantage than what handhelds have over home consoles.

The DS is the first handheld to beat the best selling home console of the same generation (Wii) and it will also outsell the PS2. Well, the Gameboy did sort of beat the SNES, but only because it was selling for two generations. SNES and PS1 account for 150m while GB/GBC sold 120m during the same timeframe. The GBA didn't beat the PS2. So really, this is a first and something must have changed. Software seems to be the most obvious answer as everything else was always the same (handhelds being affordable, cheap games, two generations in processing power behind home consoles).

Looking back at the game libraries of the GB/GBC, GBA and DS, would you say that one clearly stands above the other two? I would and my pick is the DS. Quantity, quality, variety, the DS wins in every department by a big margin.

In previous generations the lack of enough quality software did always offset the advantage of handhelds (selling to two or more persons in the same household). This generation is different in that companies outside of Nintendo put more serious effort into handheld games, mainly Japanese ones. With an increase in software quality and quantity came an increase in hardware sales. I think that makes sense, because why should people buy hardware if they think the games are meh. People have been calling the DS the new SNES (that's quite a big compliment), something they would have never done with previous handhelds.

Uh oh!

Here comes the huge debate on what does and doesn't count as a console

DS is about to become the fastest selling "VIDEO GAME SYSTEM" ever.. There, debate over. I prefer that term because no one can debate that the DS is not a video game system :P