And in relation to the OP, this proves that sales of Pokemon or any Nintendo exclusive does not garuntee higher hardware sales. Despite the DS more than doubling the 3DS in sales, it sells about the same (or maybe less) Pokemon games. You tend to find that Nintendos main stay exclusives can sell their expected amount within 40-50 million hardware units.

Of course you could say that both Zelda and Mario on the Switch are set to be the best selling entries in the franchise. This is true, but that's more down to mindshare, same happened to many Sony games on PS4. I don't doubt God Of War 4 will vastly outsell God Of War 1 2 or 3 just the same. The only ones whos franchises are on decline are MS. This is, again, down to mindshare.

You need bigger sample size, and a graph to illustrate it...... and even then alot of people wont believe you.

Climate change isnt real! because...... I dont know. /s

Nasa does it like this:

From this graph most people would go "what happend in 1920, and in 1980"?
Others would go No trend, climate change is made up.

For those that dont believe it, go to this site:  https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
Play around with the slider that shows the temp from year 1880 -> 2017.

"Seventeen of the 18 warmest years in the 136-year record all have occurred since 2001"

Every year is a new record (17 outta last 18 year),..... and its hotter than ever.... nah its all made up :p

But fact is that Wii wasnt decline and that Wii exist, @quickrick specifkly ignored Wii sales and said that reason why Wii U sold so bad is because Nintendo home consoles are in decline, saying that Wii was just light in bottle and ignoring reasons that lead to Wii U being Nintendo biggest fail. There are specifk reasons why Wii U is biggest Nintendo fail, why Wii sold so much and why Switch is selling so great now, that dont have anuthing with "trend decline" of Nintendo home consoles.

I agree it is a gross simplification, and that the existence of the trend doesn't necessarily have any impact on actual sales or potential sales. That there are many reasons and factors for a systems success or failure, regardless of it's value however, the statement or trend is still correct.

But yes, I don't agree with Quickrick that "only reason it failed because there simply wasn't a market for a dedicated nintendo home console". There were many much bigger reasons at play.

I do agree with him that Nintendo wouldn't have developed a unified system if they had two separate systems selling gangbusters though. After all they'd never have followed the Wii and DS with a unified product, as a single system could never do as well as the DS and Wii combined.

Well he's wrong because the reason for unifying userbase is to focus on one platform and save a tonne of resources, even Sony couldn't support 2 platforms, having two platforms was twice the work and resources only where as Sony quit one market Nintendo came up with a form factor to have one platform hit both markets.

I find it funny the lack of business understanding some people have as its not about both platforms selling well it's also about whether the approach is healthy and sustainable because if it isn't it'll just implode, developing for portables was equivalent to developing for consoles and most games would require a version for both portable and home so having two platforms became a hindrance and resource sink.

Thats a point, Nintendo start talking about unified platform only 2 months after Wii U launch (at that time Wii U had good launch). Nintendo was struggling with supporting two totally different platforms in same time in modern age and they couldnt folow Wii and DS with unified platform because technology wasn't there, they also talk about that, they basicly said they always had plans for something like Switch but that wasn't possible before because tehnology.

Do you have a source for that? But I wouldn't say the WiiU had a good launch, 2.2m in 2012 isn't good.

ummm the gamepad, while a cool concept in theory or like as a research experiment, was a horrible market concept. The Wii U's failure has nothing to do with Nintendo not having a market for home consoles and everything to do with the fact that the Wii U gamepad was a terrible idea that nobody wanted to buy. I have bought every Nintendo home console except the Wii U because it was a terrible concept.

Everybody knows the Wii U gamepad was a terrible concept. You are reallllly reaching there trying to say the opposite in order to argue that Nintendo doesn't have a market for home consoles.

Nintendo can't straight up compete with the much larger companies Sony and Microsoft's home consoles that can afford to make much more expensive consoles and sell at a loss for a while. So starting with the Wii Nintendo went for innovation over horsepower. The thing about innovation is sometimes you just hit on a terrible idea. They hit the mark with the Wii and sold over 100 million, they totally missed the mark with Wii U and sold 13 million. Now they've hit the mark again and combined all their best ideas into the Switch - motion controls plus bringing their two markets together with a hybrid.

If you look at the last two Nintendo home consoles you can't make any conclusion on the size of their market because one sold horrible and the other sold like 8 times as much, because one was a great innovation and one was a horrible concept.

Iwata, January. 2013:

"In this sense, what we should be discussing is not cloud gaming but whether dedicated gaming platforms will eventually die out and whether handheld gaming devices and home consoles will one day be unified. Naturally, our stance is that dedicated gaming platforms will not die out and we are determined to create a future where they will not. In terms of our platform integration, as I explained to you a short while ago, we are not saying that we are planning to integrate our platforms into one. What we are saying is that we would like to integrate software development methods, operating systems, and built-in software and software assets for each platform so that we can use them across different machines. This means that if we manage to integrate our platforms successfully, we may in fact be able to make more platforms. At the moment, we only have our current handheld devices and home consoles because if we tried to make more platforms, our development resources would be spread too thinly. The more we can share software across different platforms, the more development resources will be left for something else. Platform integration does not mean creating one type of platform, but the point is that the united method of software development will enable us to share our most precious software assets across different hardware. It is natural that there will be more things that battery-run devices can do thanks to technological advances and game consoles will become more powerful. However, if we try to linearly pursue this direction, software development will become so complicated that we will eventually face a situation where cost recovery becomes a serious issue. Therefore we feel that we are nearing a saturation point in terms of simply improving performance or enhancing graphics. What is far more important for the future of video games is whether we can make new propositions in other aspects and create games out of something that people never expected to see in the form of a game".

Last year we also started a project to integrate the architecture for our future platforms. What we mean by integrating platforms is not integrating handhelds devices and home consoles to make only one machine. What we are aiming at is to integrate the architecture to form a common basis for software development so that we can make software assets more transferrable, and operating systems and their build-in applications more portable, regardless of form factor or performance of each platform. They will also work to avoid software lineup shortages or software development delays which tend to happen just after the launch of new hardware.
Some time ago it was technologically impossible to have the same architecture for handheld devices and home consoles and what we did was therefore reasonable. Although it has not been long since we began to integrate the architecture and this will have no short-term result, we believe that it will provide a great benefit to our platform business in the long run.

Thanks that's an interesting read, it seems back in January 2013, while they were moving towards unified software, they still planned to have two separate devices for home and portable. "What we mean by integrating platforms is not integrating handhelds devices and home consoles to make only one machine."

Another interesting statement: "we are saying is that we would like to integrate software development methods, operating systems, and built-in software and software assets for each platform so that we can use them across different machines. This means that if we manage to integrate our platforms successfully, we may in fact be able to make more platforms."

It's very interesting to see that the original plan for unification was to have many systems alongside each other, rather than just the one we have at this current time.

So the change from having multiple devices may have been due to the WiiU failure, maybe not. But you're right that the unification was in motion too early to have been all a reaction to the WiiU's sales.

As a side note, no the WiiU did not have a "very good launch", and certainly not better than the Wii. Consoles sell a lot better at launch then they used to, compared to other modern launches the WiiU wasn't good.

ps4 - 4.4m
XBO - 3.0m
WiiU - 2.2m