They cannot accomplish SNES numbers without strong third party unless they pull off a non-gaming phenomenon and non-gamers become loosely attracted to the console once more.

They can, but they will always self-sabotage themselves with unneccessary mistakes and bizarre "we're Nintendo, we're a special snowflake" decision making. 

No one forced Nintendo to use cartridges only on the N64 (heck, they could've even kept the cartridge slot, the Saturn had one too). Otherwise I think they probably beat Sony that cycle, Mario 64 + GoldenEye + Zelda: OoT + fairly equal third party to PS + better graphics would've been too much for Sony to overcome. 

No one forced Nintendo to make the GameCube purple (undermining Resident Evil exclusivity) or give Sony a 18 month headstart and simply conceed the FPS shooter audience to MS and make massive, unwanted changes to all their major IPs. 

Nintendo's like a tennis player that puts themselves into a big hole in most matches by making unforced errors. Makes it very easy for the other player to get a win. The DS trounced the PSP head to head, but Nintendo was on top of their game there. 

Sony is not some unbeatable force, any time they've had to play on a relatively even playing field in terms of developer support, they've either gotten spanked (DS vs PSP) or gotten roughed up considerably (PS3/Wii/360 gen). It's pretty easy to be no.1 when you have like 90% of the developer support. 

True enough. Nintendo's handhelds have become a huge culture in itself, more their consoles and one of the major reasons for that is because they were one of the major pinoeers and they let their mascots do the talking for them at the helm of these games. With consoles they are getting out of their element because they dont want to take risks with format and follow Sony. They will more than likely always be behind Sony in format pushing because Sony's format adoption or creation affects the outside mass market in electronics. Nintendo was so afraid of piracy affecting them from using CD's before the N64 era that they screwed themselves by default. Sony was showing possibilities alot felt like Nintendo was just holding them back. Gaming with the analog was just great though. They are like that talented kid in art school who is stubborn beyond repair and it always gets in his way with the composition of his work. I like your tennis allegory.

The chance to gain the casuals attention is there, but its slim.

They don't need the same third party support to achieve the same numbers. The gaming market is much bigger nowadays.

Okami and No More Heroes were my only third party games on Wii out of around 20 games.

But they need more exclusivity deals similar to Bayonetta 2, W101, ZombiU, LCU or Hyrule Warriors. It should be possible with Japanese developers, but Western developers won't do this at the moment.

Multiplats don't affect Wii U sales at all. Numbers wouldn't be better with Battlefield, Fifa, Madden etc. Only GTA could have an effect, but Nintendo ruined his relationship with Rockstar North/DMA Design during the N64 era.

No actually the market is actually shrinking. If they dont gather the casual market and non-gaming market by surprise with an amazing phenomenon their possibilities revolve around 20-30 million without strong third party support. The Xbox and Playstation are sharing equally the PS2's former installed base (combined around 160 M+ consoles) so my guess is that it will be slightly lower than the sixth generation.The reason being is that the Wii crowd added 60 million gamers who will not stick around.

Second party will not save Nintendo. This is what Nintendo forced Sega to go through until the SNES came out. Sega lacked third party because Nintendo had the third parties under serious lockdown and Sega had to make their own first and second party sports game. When third party finally made their way onto the genesis all was well with Sega and they capped off a 40 million. They would've done more if they had third parties sooner.

Are you kidding?!  It made a MASSIVE difference!  It wasn't just a year, it was over a year and a half ahead of the others!

Do you think that the casual market is 100% on tablets and smartphones now and they will never buy a home console again? They surely won't buy X1 or PS4 at 399-499.

It starts to work with the Japanese. It surely won't be as successful as it was with the Wii, but it also won't be 90% less.

The people who still buy Just Dance, Skylanders or Disney Infinity on Wii may buy a Wii U when no new games are released on Wii anymore and the Wii U is at $200.

Ok, multiplats could have an effect on casual gamers. The casual games didn't sell well until now because the Wii U audience consists mainly of experienced Nintendo fans.

I hope you understand what I mean, my English isn't the best...

Not to sound like a dick about it, but how old were you when the PS2 launched? The buzz was relentess and I don't think the premise of a new competitor with a very uncertain future, or a lunchbox (from the perspective of the masses) would've done much to derail it. It's arguable that Sony won the generation just by calling the system "Playstation 2".

Nope. The market perception for the Gamecube was completely wrong. Not only that but the third party choices were slim and the first party was the worst Nintendo has ever had.

It would've helped, I think they would've sold more in the 30-40 million range instead of 22 million. 

Gifting Sony 18 freaking months of lead time was never going to be a good idea and it gave Micrcosoft all the time in the world to get their act together too. 

If they had launched a year earlier they probably would have had to have used some late gen N64 projects to launch the machine with, so I think the market perception would've been considerably different if Zelda: Majora's Mask, Perfect Dark, Sin & Punishment, and Conker's Bad Fur Day are your launch titles and then you also grab Resident Evil exclusivity on top of that.

Majora's Mask still features a kid Link, but would've been seen more as a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time and then Nintendo would've also have been free to experiment more with Wind Waker and take their time on that game. 

GameCube would've gotten more attention too for something of the good things they actually did that gen. The GameCube was flat out a better chipset than the PS2, producing nicer graphics, and far easy to program for. Problem is XBox showed up with the same advantages and kinda stole their thunder. 

Nintendo parroted that line and Rogue Squadron looked great, but then MS showed up the same week and said "well hey our system is easy to program for too and has even more RAM and look we got Halo" ... and that pretty much took a lot of sizzle off Nintendo's steak.