The best thing is Nintendo's reasoning for the GC's small design, lunchbox handle and all, was because they said space in Japanese homes was at a premium, therefore they wanted their console to take up as little space as possible.  This reasoning was later tweaked with the Wii and Wii U saying they were targeting low power consumption in addition to being spacially efficient.

Meanshile, Sony put out two beasts over the past couple of gens with the PS2 and PS3 phat, but that didn't seem to deter folks over in the homeland from purchasing them.

My favorite console of all time

Then clearly not a lot of adults bought the PS3, because the general consensus is that it looked stupid.

As long as Sony doesn't pull another PS3 with the people will buy our product because we're Sony attitude, Nintendo may never lead home console sales again.

The platinum silver GameCube which I owned honestly looked really cool, but alas the damage had been done by then I suppose.

People don't want game consoles that look like children's toys.

Nintendo did make the very slick looking Wii though afterwards ... the black Wii is one of the nicer looking consoles ever made IMO.

Generally speaking people don't care that much about console appearance, but they don't want something that stands out too much either. "Bland/non-descript" seems to be what people are OK with, lol. 

no well unless iwata and reggie get fired and get some open minded people there and change there terms for developers especially the one about religion if the next bioshock has something like that then it won't be on nintendos console

Then you clearly didn't see the multitude of pictures and threads mocking the PS3's appearance in the first few years of the PS3's life like the one I posted.

Either way, if you think any significant portion of people buy a gaming console for anything other than the games, it's more than obvious who is living in a parallel universe here.

Thats what i dont understand... they tried doing powerful hardware at 99$ you could not beat the gamecube but for some reason the ps2 won.

now everyones saying that the reason nintendo is doing bad is because of hardware.. when clearly its not. its the damn gimmicks

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

― C.S. Lewis

you know they come in platinum and black right? why would an adult care about the appearance of something that's primary goal is to play games? your not even going to be looking at the thing most of the time. Did you care what people thought that much?