They won't fail in the sense of Sega, but they wil fail in the sense of SNES/N64/GCN where they experienced a huge decline

People who are into gaming are not 'hardcore'. I don't really know what hardcore is but only a   minority of gamers consider themselves as such.

NSMBii is a bridge title.

All gamers started somewhere, most didn't just jump into gaming, they started out simple and spread out to more complex titles.

And also, stop with the 3D Mario is crap thing. SMG1/2 are considered two of the best  games this gen and regardless of wether you like it or not, millions do.

Old school 2D Mario is awesome but so is 3D mario.

Yeah let's replace all titles that sold less than NSMBW by another 2D Mario

Mario Galaxy  becomes  NSMBW2

Metroid Prime 3 becomes NSMBW3

Super Smash Bros. Brawl becomes NSMBW4

Mario Galaxy 2 becomes NSMBW5

Kirby's Epic Yarn becomes NSMBW6

Donkey Kong Country Returns becomes NSMBW7

[...]

Do you really think Nintendo would be more successful using your strategy?

Seriously, what is up with all these threads as of late, when we know next to nothing?

Sometimes I despair when I look at the Nintendo forum

It's the fun, crazy time before a new console revealed at the E3, take a cocktail and enjoy.

I somewhat agree, Nintendo is starting to divert back to the red ocean of horsepower and hardcore catered games. However, I believe this console has the potential to be sort of a modern SNES, as in, a red ocean console, but still highly successful and admired by many gamers of all kinds, and with a better library/stronger third party support.

While I don't think the console will be as successful as Wii, this no longer really matters to me as long as the library is strong. In other words, I would rather Nintendo have a 50 million selling console with phenomenal third and 1st party support, than the 100 million selling Wii with terrible third party support.

Look at it this way, if Nintendo slides TOO much, rest assured sooner or later they will have Gamecube like sales and once again they will be forced to adapt their strategy. Remember, the failures of the Gamecube is what caused Nintendo to pull their heads from their ass and eventually make the hugely successful Wii, by catering to the mass market and bringing the old school fundementals of gaming back. So such a thing could definitly happen again, if the market forces them to.

The market has this great way of humbling and knocking sense into companies when their own ego inflates too much for their own good. It happened to Sony towards the end of the PS3 lifecycle after their miserable start, and you can bet it will happen Nintendo again should they revert too heavilly back to the hardcore strategies of N64 and Gamecube.

This is where that whole "all first party games must be system sellers," line of thinking collapses

the problem with your reasoning is that if you were to rank the type of mario game that has sold the best this generation then that means nintendo should only be making mario kart games because the combined sales of mario kart wii and ds have out sold the combined sales of NSMB wii and ds.

so what your saying(based on what i have read so far) is that Nintendo should abandon any game that didnt sell over 10 million units and only focus on releasing sequels to those that did? all 7 or 8 of them? yeah, totally sounds like a winning strategy.

Which is why Nintendo has very little it can learn from the public at this point