Yeah, but the "down side" is that the game appears to deserve WAY better sales... kinda 50k at least i have hoped... Well... At least I can buy one before the production stops o_O

Leo,

It's because they took a couple of new ideas, put them together right, promoted it right, and changed the playing field.

It started with the DS.  As cringer8 says '^Actually, the DS was pretty slow out of the gates. It had no software worth mentioning in its first six months.'  But then Nintendogs came out.  And it did two things.  It showed why the stylus *HAD* to be used (the petting of the dogs and the throwing of the frezbee can 'only' be done by the stylus.  No button pushing will match that feel.)  And it showed that large numbers of females could be gamers as well.  

Wii came along and furthered those ideas.  That simulated actions that you did would be reflected in a game, and the games could entertain everyone, not just those with fast reflexes and easily trained to learn complex rote sequences.  (ie, sequenced button smashing).

Then it did a marketing blitz that will be in marketing 101 classes for years.  The alpha mom concept, retirement and cruise ships, hitting the talk show circuit.   Betting on the all people like fun, and not frustration.  It worked.  Even better than glorious graphics that you don't have time to look at because you will be killed, crash or scored upon by the opposing team if you stop and take the time.

You have to realize that every generation each company needs to make their console special so that it differentiates itself from the others, or at the very least keeps up.  The generally accepted thing to do is to increase the graphical power, but how you get there is an art.  Sony made many engineering and design mistakes when preparing the PS3, which lead to their extremely high price point at launch (and extremely high losses last fiscal year).

Nintendo had another idea -- they saw that development costs were reaching unsustainable levels for many game developers.  Everyone in the computer industry realizes that power is an inevitability: there will always be people developing it and factories with improving manufacturing capacity.  Every generation power becomes cheaper and more available by default.  Nintendo decided to use this this to their advantage and make significant innovations with control for both their DS and their Wii systems.

And in both cases, they paid off bigtime.

Nintendo didn't exactly come out of left field here.  They already have, by far, the strongest first party development.  And with the DS, they were building third party relationships where they held a lot of leverage: developing for the DS is extremely lucrative.  Nintendo had all of the pieces in place to push harder than ever before this generation.  Microsoft didn't see it coming because they never see anything coming.  They're not exactly visionaries.  Sony should have seen it coming, but they were far too proud of their brand to see anything else.

As of late, Sony has been doing an admirable job of digging itself out of the PS3 hole that Kutagari left them in.  The holiday season is over now and we'll see if they can maintain any momentum or if they'll go the way that both they and Microsoft went last year. 

 They convinced my parents that gaming is fun