How are you coming up with 6-10 million being the baseline when 3DS had 3 consecutive years of shipments at or around 13 million?

FY 2012-13.53 million

FY 2013-13.95 million

FY 2014-12.24 million

It's not returning to normal (Nintendo wished!) and it's not dying. It's shrinking and by how much will probabaly be visible only next generation.

As other posts show, 3DS is both a success and a reason to fear (lowest shipments in a long time, as Soundwave mentioned) bad days ahead.
Could Nintendo sell more if they cut the price by 50$? Most likely, yes. But Nintendo is not in a position to cut prices now and probably won't be next gen aswell.
The market shrunk a lot for price cuts to make platforms really expand their userbase; You cut prices and you risk losing profits in the long run.

If it is possible, i would try and bring the Android OS to the next handheld.
Giving parents the best of both worlds, would be more appealing than a handheld at 199, with just Nintendo, LEGO and japanese games. Add to that Android games and you get, for that price, a really good alternative for a tablet.

I think the days of 13+ million shipments are kinda winding to a close for them. Mobile is continuing to hurt them every year. 

They never really ever had to try this hard just to manage these types of numbers before. 

They need a game changer to alter this, like finding a new Pokemon type hit. 

The thing with the expansion of mobile is that even 2012 is a long time ago now. Mobile has grown much bigger since then. Back then seeing a TV commercial for a mobile game would've been absurd today it's commonplace. 

The 3DS yearly shipments we're seeing in 2014, 2015, and 2016 I think are more indictive of what the future holds for dedicated Nintendo handhelds. 

The cost of the 3DS has been a non-issue from August 2011 onwards (three-four months after launch).

$169.99 is a reasonable price for a handheld device, if you're not willing to pay even that, odds are you didn't really want one in the first place.

Price hasn't been an issue for the 3DS.

I don't buy the other excuses either (d-pad placement? lol). Nintendo was f*cked the moment this took off:

Based on? I mean didn't mobile gaming grow quite a bit from FY 2012 to FY 2013 to FY 2014? Despite that, sales remained pretty consistent for 3DS in those 3 years. FY 2015 is the first year for 3DS to show a sharp decline, is it solely do to mobile gaming or could it possibly be something else........idk like the system is simply showing a natural sales curve and is beginning to decline due to being past the halfway point in its life?

Nintendo has 6, 1st party games on 3DS that have or will soon pass 10 million, 11 over 3 million, 23 over 1 million with more certainly to come. The only way for Nintendo's handhelds to have a drastic drop from 3DS numbers is if these series all have massive declines which isn't likely.

Actually what I feel happened in those years is mobile cut the legs off 3DS' growth. 

A normal healthy platform should have higher sales in years 2 and 3, and 3DS should have too, Nintendo was throwing everything at it ... all their big IPs, model revisions each year, but they were stuck spinning their wheels at the same level before starting to sink by the 4th year. 

If mobile didn't exist I think the 3DS' trajectory would've been more like this 

13 mill - Year 1

16 mill - Year 2

20+ mill - Year 3

18 mill - Year 4

But mobile is like an anchor on the 3DS, that's now dragging it down to its grave. Nintendo has to sweat like crazy just to maintain a baseline of 13 million in their peak years that would've been considered mediocre to them a few years earlier. 

The Game Boy Color had shipments in the US of 

8.7 mill (FYE Mar 2000)

7.74 mill (FYE Mar 2001)

Then the GBA simply picks up right where the GBC left off in its first two years:

7.5 mill (FYE Mar 2002)

7.8 mill (FYE Mar 2003)

Shrugs. Seems fairly consistent to me. Once Pokemon took like crazy around late 1999 in the US, Game Boy brand sales in the US were high, that wasn't an "unexplained" anamoly though. 

The DS was the anamoly in that it had a slow first two years in the US, but even then Nintendo quickly returns to 7+ mill handheld sales in the North American market fairly quickly and then of course begins to crush that number. 

Nowadays, 3DS is going to probably have issues hitting 7 mill+ worldwide this year, let alone being to do that just in the American market like the GBC, GBA, and DS all did several times. 

3DS' peak year in the US market for sales was 4.6 million. GBC is 8.7 million, GBA is 9.45 million, DS is 12.29 mill. 3DS is odd man out there, not the GBA. 

Again, I will repeat. The only thing Sony and Nintendo need to do to gain back a major share of the market they lost, is make these devices work on mobile networks.

Why would anyone ever buy a 3DS or Vita right now when they are completly usless outside of the house, and just one extra things to lug around. With a 4G 3DS or Vita, the device could replace your cell phone or tablet. This is the only thing missing from the actual hardware, and the only thing stopping these devices from reaching or surpassing their predicessors.

The reason Android and iOS got so big is because they are always connected devices, and they are always with the consumer. This means more chances to make purchases on the devices. This means more times connecting to the web, this means money in developing for these platforms.

Sony and Nintendo need to give their consumers the opertunity to have these devices on them every day, and everywhere they go. That is the winning formula. If people are using these devices to make phone calls, text, social network, bank, pay bills, navigate, watch netflix, etc., etc., etc., then the developers will flock to them.

With network connected handhelds, Sony and Nintendo would draw the userbases required to support AAA development. They would have an active enough usersbase that big buisness could not ignore them, and iOS/Android apps would have to make their way to the devices. This is a really simiple turn key issue, and it blows my mind that two Japanese companies from the home of mobile devices have failed to figure this out. Why the 3G Vita was not replaced with a 4G model goes down as the biggest failure the PlayStation brand has ever suffered.

For one, as I just pointed out, the 2nd full fiscal year was larger than the 1st full fiscal year (13.53 vs 13.95) and it's also very likely that the $80 price cut caused a lot of people to purchase one earlier than they normally would. It's also not uncommon for a device to peak in its 2nd full year, I believe PS2 did that so was that an unhealthy platform?

Ur also acting like releasing their big IP's and doing nearly annual revisions is some sort of desperate answer to mobile

We need to understand mobile gaming was still in a relatively infant state even as recently as 2010. The App Store did not launch with the iPhone it came later and took some time for the game infastructure to really develop and be understood by the consumer.

Launched in December 2009, Angry Birds is the first really huge break out blockbuster mobile game app. Through 2010, gaming apps started to blossom, and by 2012/2013 they were on a different level, by this time the impact on Nintendo is starting to become unmistakable as they are launching games like Pokemon X/Y, Animal Crossing, etc. on the 3DS but unlike the DS we are seeing no year over year growth. 

At GDC 2011, Iwata uncharacteristically blasts mobile games as being a threat to the industry, Nintendo already by then was deeply concerned by mobile's explosive growth. In the years since, I think they've gradually just come to the position that this may be a fight they simply cannot win and opted into their current position. 

I could be wrong too but I think every full year since the iOS App Store has existed, dedicated handhelds have suffered declining sales *every* single year since, and this coming year will simply continue that trend. 

The 3DS if anything benefitted from launching when iOS apps were still in their infancy. The iPad and tablets weren't a thing when the the 3DS launched either, and smartphones were still a relative luxury item for older people circa 2011. If the 3DS had launched later, I don't know honestly if Nintendo could have even hit 13 million in any of the years, mobile gaming had grown too strong by 2013 or so.