I'll deal with you when I get home, Roland Elizabeth Stoppable. I have to work right now.

My opinion is based on decades of experience, game media, and people's behaviors.  I just used a couple of casuals (both family members) as an example.  Anyway, let's take a walk down memory lane.

The Gameboy launched in about 1989 and it was an undeniable, success.  It sold to everybody because it was cheap, had good battery life, a good library of (let's admit it) shitty games with a few gems every now and then.  It came packed with Tetris and Super Mario Land was a launch title.  No Pokemon, yet.  Anyway, everybody--casuals, hardcore, black, white, young, old--we all had a Gameboy. 

The Gameboy color didn't come out until 1998!!  Damn near a decade later!  You don't think that people were hungry for the upgrade?  Pokemon came out in 1998 ('96 in Japan) and it was for the original Gameboy!!  If you look at the games that launched with the Gameboy color, you'd be very underwhelmed.  Centepede?  Tetris Deluxe!?  A port of the original Nes version of Super Mario Bros. came out months later and it was a success but do you think Gameboy color games were the driving force behind the sales or do you think it was the improved hardware?  It was a huge step up from the green and yellow (and the eventual black and white) of the original Gameboy.  So, like the Wii and the DS, Nintendo offered a huge "hook" in hardware.  That's why it sold.  You're argument about a version of Tetris or a 2D Mario falls flat.  Yeah, it had a Tetris game and a Mario game, but these were PORTS/Slight upgrades to games we already had.  I could argue that the Gameboy Color sold because it was backwards compatible to a game that people could play on an original Gameboy--Pokemon.  It had just become a phenomenon in the U.S.

Next stop, Gameboy Advance.  It came out in 2001.  When did we get our Pokemon (2003), new 2D Super Mario Bros. game (never), Tetris, etc.?  In the first six months of the GBA's life?  None of your "pillars" are here--especially in the same time frame that the 3DS has been on the market.  You said that the GBA sold faster but it damn sure wasn't because of Mario, Tetris, or Pokemon!

You mentioned the Super Nes, as well.  In the U.S., it launched in 1991 with Pilotwings, Super Mario, and F-Zero.  Mario was the pack in and the hardware was noticeably more powerful...to the hardcore.  I remember (and based on your comment in the "Parents complain about...." thread, you remember, too.) many casuals of the day couldn't really see the difference/improvement in the quality of the games.  The Snes wound up selling less than the Nes.  To be honest, I don't even remember any sports games at launch.  Bill Lambeer's Combat Basketball and maybe a baseball game. It didn't get the followup Mario games (unless you count Super Mario All-Stars) until 1995 and Yoshi's Island was overlooked at the time because of Donkey Kong Country.  Still most of us, to this day, will claim that the Super Nes has had the best library and the best support of any Nintendo console, ever (Starfox, Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, etc.). It still didn't outdo the Nes.  It was better hardware and better supported but, like the 3DS, many people just didn't see the jump from Nes to Super Nes.  They stuck with their Nes's.

Even the Nintendo DS didn't have your "pillars", at launch!  It came out in 2004.   We didn't get a 2D Super Mario game until 2006!!  It launched with a port of an old N64 game, Super Mario 64!  Like I said, the DS offered something new, hardware wise that people hadn't seen before in a handheld--the touch screen, as well as unique software.  With the DS on track to becoming one of the best selling (if not THE best selling) video game device of all time, it didn't follow your formula of success.

You said the Wii put the pillars back in place.  Wii came out in 2006.  NSMB Wii came out in 2009.  The Wii was impossible to find and in high demand loooooong before Super Mario Bros. Wii.  Wii Sports may have towed the line but really, a lot of people (not me, I think it was a great game) feel that it was nothing more than a Wii REmote tech demo.  If this is the case, maybe it wasn't Wii Sports that drove the sales of the Wii.  Maybe it was the "something new" of the whole Wii experience.  Maybe it was the Wii Remote that sold the Wii.  It damn sure helped Wii Play move a few units, didn't it?

So, my point in my original post was that the Wii and the DS offered something new.  The 3DS (which, by the end of this year, will have its own Mario Kart and Super Mario Bros.) has to overcome the obstacle of being seen as a Super Nes compared to an Nes.  It's going to be hard for Nintendo to convince people who were satisfied with a DS that better graphics and such are worth upgrading for.  Like the people who went from Nes to Snes or N64 to Gamecube, that's just not enough--no matter how good the games are.  Pair that up with unprecedented competition from other portable devices, and I'm just glad that I don't have to figure out how Nintendo plans to sell the 3DS to anybody but the hardcore.  Same goes for the Wii U.  Same goes for the PSV.  Same thing with the PS3.

Of course there's more to it than what I posted but this is what I personally feel is the biggest obstacle to overcome.  If anything, I firmly believe that the 3DS will have a better library than most other Nintendo devices had in a similar time frame.

For the record, the 3DS came out (at least in my territory) at the very end of March. It is still the first half of August. That means it's been on the maket for all of April, May, June, and July with only an additional half a month if you count the few days in March and the beginning of August. Four and a half months. That's it. Which console (besides the Dreamcast) was able to blow you away with its library in 4.5 months?

I'm not so sure the DS/wii strategy would work a second time, with the wii alot of really causual people who don't really care about gaming got it for wii sports and wii fit and alot of the hardcore nintendo fans felt burned, there's nothing to suggest the casuals would upgrade to the next nintendo console and if they repeated what they did with wii alot of the hardcore nintendo fans would have left them. As for the DS, the dual screen and touch screens got people interested but in the end they just played the same games they always do and on the wii and the DS 3rd party support was exceptionally crappy and Sony gained ground with the psp and the vita is almost certain to do better then the psp and on the other side you have phone game market going after really casual people, so hardcore nintendo fans are getting bored of the same nintendo games 100 times and Sony is gaining ground on all hardcore gamers in the portable space and the really casuals are going with phone games which are 99 cents for alot of the same shovelware DS got for 30, if they repeated the strategy both Sony and phones would gain ground on them, though in hindsight it would have been better then they are doing now, but that's hindsight.

@gumbytrucker  "Therefor I cannot get behind the argument that these games are either easy to make or require limited time. In fact, assuming a game sells twenty million units simply because it's called Mario Kart or Mario Brothers is an insult to the consumer!"

Easy to make might not be the best term. Cheaper to make than alot of other games??? I'd say so, but what i really want to address is the second sentence. I think you give people too much credit or maybe im just a cynical SOB, maybe both. But look at the Mario Party series. Alot would say it started sucking b4 it even left the N64, but the games kept selling, on sure it slowed down when people wised up, but that took some time. Even better example, Mario Sports Mix. A meh effort from SE and that game still sold a mil plus. Why?? Because Mario was on the cover, oh sure it's not doing as well as the other Mario games but thats still a lot. There are better games on Wii that didnt do that well in that time frame. Nintendo could crap in a box, put Mario's name on it and it least a million people would buy it no hesitation, no reading reviews, before they realize it stinks and they already gave their money. In their defense, most Mario games are good so this does not happen often

No you are right, people buy crap because of the name that's on it and past games they like, I myself have got 2 spiderman games because of spiderman 2, though I did actually watcha  review on one of them (the other one I can't remember) it steered me wrong, the 1st one I got (after spiderman 2) I liked but not as much as spiderman 2 and the 2ed one was a major let down (the one the reviewers recommended...) so yeah, you can't even trust professional reviewers anymore which just makes the whole situation worse, though demos are picking up steam. If you ever doubt that people buy something just because of hyped/advertisement and the name on it just look at FFXIIIs sales, the game was pure garbage. 

Ninten78 sent this ad to me.  Another step in the right direction, if you ask me!

its not a bad commercial but it doesn't look like a Nintendo commercial..

agreed

shoud have just read this one. agreed