In my opinion Nintendo will increase their sales numbers again... but this is based on the assumption that Nintendo is staying away from making any new "innovative" device/controlscheme/controller mandatory. The thing is that Nintendo should try to make the console as cheap as possible from the start... If a new innovative device is that good people will buy it anyways.

The 3D and the tablet controller where bad ideas that made the consoles more expensive and many users are not needing them... It is always a bad thing for a consumer if you have to pay for something that you do not want to use (and having some people constantly telling you that these things are great if you start using them regularly).

The VITA is a good example. The Vita is the best handheld I had so far (if I consider only the hardware potential). But the VITA is simply too expensive and that hurt sales and software potential. The VITA was ahead of its time and it would have been better to make a PSP2 instead.

If we follow their sales history trend, their hardware sales in the next generation will be even lower than WiiU and 3DS

Consoles have shown a trend with the exception of Wii, so I'll give u that but their has been no handheld trend.

GB/GBC-118 million

GBA-82 million

DS-155 million

3DS-50 million (65-70 lifetime)

What trend are u talking about?

A few notes as well, GB/GBC spanned 2 generations and 12 years without a successor while GBA had a successor 3.5 years after launch which cut its legs short, it shipped 20m the year before DS released, so those two are an unfair comparison.

Wii/DS were the exceptions, everything else failed to outsell its predecesor. GB >>> GBA >>> 3DS

It's not a trend for handhelds, it went down once and back up, not enough data points for a trend.

Consoles is a trend because it went down 3 times in a row

GBA would've sold 100+ million easy had it not been cut short. Probably 120 million in all honesty.

excluding the DS, it went down twice. Its probably gonna happen again in the next gen as well

It would have been destroyed by the PSP before even reaching 100M

I dont think handhelds will keep decreasing. But I think Nintendo may have a hard time asking consumers to pay a relatively high price for a handheld. So they may not be able to up spec all that much.

As long as they drop the Wii name I think their next home console will do better. Who knows, maybe there will be another generation of casuals ready to give consoles a try.

next Nintendo handheld will outsell 3ds but will not have ds like sales