1) - well if nintendo wanted to sell to a new market all they need to do is make products that appeal to that market.  its much easier said than done of course. your suggestion is correct, but i would say offer not one product, not two, but many so it can have good pentration and sell to that market properly

2) well selling to the non-gamer/casual is very different to selling to the adult gamer audience. its basically the blue ocean/ red ocean strategy. im pretty sure every nintendo die hard fan heard of this, but if you didnt ill give you a quick explanation to what it is. going back to my point the casual crowd was in the blue ocean part. while the more adult gamer is in the red ocean part. nintendo didnt have to fight to get the cusual crowd, but to get the adult crowd they have to compete with ms/sony. the problem with that is again brand recognition. nintendo is seen as the console for kids/teens while adults see sony/ms as the console for adults. nintendo has to 1) - change that image without alienating their current fan base. 2) provide products that appeal to adult crowd. 3) successfully market there new products to the new market they want to appeal to. which is something easier said than done, again.

3) by steady stream of high quality games i didnt mean just excluisves, i ment 3rd party games as well. 3rd party games will be the majorty of that steady stream of products. exclusives job is to differentiate a console from its competitors. it why halo and gears pushed the 360, because they were the deciding factor between it and the ps3 in its early days. they both got 3rd party games but xbox had halo and gears so people went to xbox and its why ps3 sales didnt pick up quickly until 2009 when uncharted 2, killzone2 and infamous came out. 

@bolded. no, metriod doesnt have anywhere near the same appeal as halo does, and it never will. no matter how much they market it halo will still sell much better than metriod. halo is a very popular form of pop culture specially between adults and thats something no company can intentionally make or plan, it just happens. metriod wont ever be. thats why metriod and another game wont be enough to sell that console to the adult market. looking at sony they needed a huge list of exculsives directed at adults to sell there console where MS just needed halo and gears. sony had uncharted, killzone, infamous, heavy rain, god of war, gran turismo, MLB, motorstorm, metal gear 4 and resistance to get that market pentration add to that that there reputation and brand recoginition is very popular between the adult gamer market. 

i completly agree with you, marketing is a VERY important part of a game selling, but metriod didnt sell much not because of marketing, but because of who they were marketing it to

Their loss, I guess

I'm a Nintendo fanatic, and even I will admit that Metroid Prime was highly overrated. The only thing it had going for it were graphics that looked nice at the time. The setting was empty even compared to previous 2D metroids, and the gameplay was both much slower and clunkier than its SNES predecessor. The gameplay of Prime is largely about running through caves at a slow pace, shooting at things and scanning other things.

Assassin's Creed 2 and on offer rich and highly interesting environments with very smooth gameplay. I really feel that other Nintendo fans are really missing out if they ignore this series. Hopefully the collection will come to Wii U. It was one of the series on PS3 that didn't disappoint, rather it was surprisingly excellent (made up for disappointments like Red Dead Redemption, Resident Evil 5, Final Fantasy 13, and Grand Theft Auto 4). No comment on Halo, on a Microsoft system and I refuse to buy their products.

gamers go to where the games they want to play are ... and for the "older-teen" it isn't nintendo.  nintendo content for that audience sucks compared to what MSony currently offer. 

like wise, MSony make sucky content for children, girls, and the "casuals" that nintendo dominates.  therefore those audiences don't like MSony content or console.

i've been slammed before for even suggesting that the userbase for nintendo and non-nintendo consoles were anything but identical but look at the facts.

the issue with MP isn't advertisement, it's content. 

Part of that is the MP content itself.  don't get me wrong, MP is a good game.  But, MP is also design with features like aiming locks and it gameplay is slow paced.  it should be pretty self evident from the "call of dutying" of all shooters that fast twitch gameplay is the in thing with that teenage boy crowd. 

The other part of content is nintendo's overall library.  half of nintendo's library has mario in the title and mario (or anything else that would even slightly demasculate a teenage boy) is to be shunned.

nintendo is better at making certain types of content.  MSony are better at making other types of content.  it is as simple as that.

Well, that's kind of what I mean. They did bad marketing, and they didn't target their demographic properly ("who they were marketing to"), and that is a marketing failure, so we actually agree :)

Ultimately, I compared Halo to Prime, and showed that Nintendo failed to reach the audience that would best sustain its sales and development budget. I believe that if Nintendo changes their marketing, they can turn Prime into a pop culture icon much like Halo has become, by giving it that time of day that is required for an icon to shine. As such, I believe that if Halo could do it, anything can if done right, even Metroid. Your insistence to say it isn't possible for metroid has yet to be supported by a proper argument.

Intrinsically, what about Metroid makes it an unsuitable candidate to the Halo/AC poster boy strategy? If it's appeal, is that something that can be fixed? Is it unappealing because it wasn't properly marketted or is it intrinsically unappealing? Because we all know that COD isn't the greatest game on earth, not necessarily the most appealing, but that good advertising and good word of mouth led to a snowball effect. Can this happen for Metroid and if so, did Nintendo miss the boat and can they fix that?

If Sony couldn't do it, that's not a valid point because MS was able to do it. So if MS could, then clearly Sony and/or Nintendo could, it's just a matter of finding the right recipe and doing it right.

i have to disagree with you, pop culture isnt something you can force, not even with loads and loads of marketing. it just happens suddenly and usually out of he blew. nobody expected halo to become what it is, but it did. many factors affected it yes but halo was never a decent seller it was always a huge seller. as for fixing the appeal of metriod, well by doing that your changing what the game is and that will probably alienate the current fan base of the game, resulting in bad word of mouth instead of good one from the original fans.  Pop culture isnt necessarily linked to quality, another example is gangnam style, this song has exploded in popularity and became popular culture, why did it become so popular? how? lol that is beyond me but it just did. did anybody plan it or predict it? hell no lol but it just did. and thats the thing, if metriod was gonna become popular culture, it would have by now, but its not showing any sings of growing for it to explode, a lot of people heard about it but they just dont care. Sony and nintendo both have games that are pop culture, nintendo with mario of course and zelda, sony with gran turismo (well atleast in europe) and god of war to some extent in the US. but generally nintendo is known to not take risks at all, they barely make new IPs that they give good support to, and that holds them back from creating something that adults would find as a must buy