Just Dance is the exception, not the norm. Just Dance, shovelware crap that comes out every year with minimal effort put in, is one thing; Mario, Zelda, Xenoblade, and Nintendo’s other franchises is another. 

The fact still remains that Nintendo’s resources were limited and if they had spent any more of them on developing games for the Wii post-2011, those are less games coming out on 3DS, let alone the Wii U.

Hindsight: 20-20 The Wii U was going to flop regardless and there was nothing that was going to save it. The 3DS on the other hand? That could still have been salvaged and it was. If you took some of the early 3DS games like NSMB2, FE: Awakening, KI: Uprising, Tomodachi Life, 3D Land, and Sticker Star and put them on the Wii. The 3DS was already struggling enough to gain traction. How much more fucked would that system have been if it lost some of those titles?  

Not only was the 3DS going to sell considerably less. Some of those titles I listed would have sold considerably less on the Wii than they did on 3DS. Galaxy 2 had already sold around 5 million less than Galaxy 1, and that was when Wii sales were still relatively healthy. So what would 3D Land have done on the Wii at a time when the Wii was all but dead post-2011? How about Uprising? Does Sticker Star still do 2.5 million?

What about Fire Emblem? Awakening was supposed to be the last game in the series until it blew sales expectations out of the water, being on the 3DS when its sales and momentum was at its peak, was one reason why. Does Awakening still reach those levels on a dead system where its last entry, Radiant Dawn, didn’t even reach .50 million when the Wii was at its early peak? Congratulations, Rol. In your scenario, Fire Emblem is dead.

The only game out of that bunch that I could see doing better would have been NSMB 2. 

But one game doesn’t justify the underachieving performances of other games and especially underachieving hardware. 2011-2023 was the one time where Nintendo posted operating losses, how much steeper would those losses have been if they went down the route of giving more support to a system in its way out? 

The writing was on the wall. It was time to move on. 

You're spot on. 

This was also evident with the DS-3DS, even thought the DS only got 4 titles after the 3DS launched, even that was too much. 

They stupidly wasted Pokemon Black 2 White 2 on the DS when the 3DS was crashing and burning and dying for software because no one wanted freaking Nintendogs as a launch title. 

That forced them to have to cut the price of the system massively after just 3 months and lose hundreds of millions of dollars. 

That game should have been on the 3DS, it needed it about 10000000 times more than the DS did. 

Again this is like a parent feeding their fat ass 18 year old son but starving their newborn infant ... you need to have some freaking sense of priorities. 

Something I've come to realize in the discussions of this thread is that even though the Wii was initially crazy successful and had a shorter replacement cycle than its competitors (while still taking 6 years to be replaced), the problem lies in the Wii's specs and approach. The Wii had pretty garbage specs (even for 2006 standards) and that hurts the longevity of the console in terms of first and third party support. The Switch is a different case because it's a hybrid. Yes, its specs as a home console can be pretty garbage. But it is a clear generational leap over the 3DS and Vita in terms of the handheld market. Plus, the motion controls on Switch are more tastefully integrated.
So even though I do believe the Wii was killed off too early, they really would've had to shift the focus to justify waiting until 2013 for a successor. We would've needed more first-party support like Star Fox, another Mario spin-off, and maybe some remakes. We also might have needed a Wii Pro or something in 2010 or 2011 with at least 128 MB of RAM, a slightly faster CPU and GPU, and HDMI support.

That's not true of the PS2 at all.  The PS3 had a disastrous launch.  The PS2 being successful did absolutely nothing for the follow up console.

Exactly, lol, if you actually really look at the history of this stuff a lot of these assumptions that get thrown around aren't true. 

They stem really from logic that applied to Sega 25 years ago, that's not really applicable to Nintendo, MS, or Sony. 

Consumers don't give you any benefit of the doubt based on what you did with an older system when it comes to a new system, even Sony found that out the hard way, they went from the equivalent of being the big man on campus (PS2) to no one willing to return their calls (PS3 circa 2007) in a span of a year, lol. 

Quite frankly I like the game industry is this way. Your past success, even from 12 months ago doesn't mean much when you come to a new console.

You have to perform and prove yourself all over again. Doesn't matter if you supported your previous console for 4 years or 8 years, it doesn't mean shit. If Sony doesn't have a solid launch strategy and execution for the PS5, all the work they did for the PS4 doesn't mean shit. They will find themselves in trouble. Same with Nintendo and Switch 2. Nobody cares how good you were with the previous cycle, it buys you no brownie points and there are multiple examples of that just in the last 15 years.

You don't get to curl up into a ball and bask in your success in this business. You have a successful console? Great, congrats. You get a short time to enjoy that before you get your ass to work on the future. Plain and simple. If you want to be patted on the back continually for things you did 2-3 years ago or you think you're entitled to something because your last system did pretty well, you got another thing coming.

How is the U going to get "popular" if you can play much of its library on the older system? There's not as much incentive to upgrade. 

It's better to cannibalize your previous system to benefit your next one. It's better for your company, because a botched console transition is something that is going to badly damage the company for years. Just like Nintendo went from top of the world to being embarrassed to announce several years of losses because within a blink of an eye.

High profile late gen N64 titles should have been moved to the GameCube. 

Late cycle DS projects like Pokemon Black 2 White 2 should have been moved to the 3DS launch window (the system was DRYING for help and lol the DS is getting a Pokemon game, that's terrible, terrible software management). 

Pulling Zelda TP and BOTW as GCN and Wii U exclusives was 100% the right move even if they did get a quiet, low print release on those systems. 

You absolutely do need to prioritize the new system way more than the old one once the old system reaches a matured age. 

Like I said, if a 16-year-old kid can't understand that their mom/dad needs to give most of their attention to a newborn baby, the problem isn't the baby, it's the kid who is being an idiot. New consoles are like new borns, they need constant attention and constant focus until they are grown enough to stand on their own two feet. If you don't give them the care they need at that stage of life it can lead to serious issues later on in their life. 

No one in this business ever said "geez you have too many good games for the your launch window, would you stop with all this software". You should always err on the side of having more than what you need for a new product cycle, it's the most vital thing in the business in my opinion. That's really what separates good management from mediocre management, how they deal with console transition. 

It could work, but only if the new console is not starved for content.

Like the 3DS could play Pokemon Black 2 White 2, but did any one give Nintendo any inch of benefit of the doubt over that? Nope. All they were talking about was how shit the 3DS lineup was because all it was was Nintendogs with kittens and Pilotwings and not much else. They didn't care that hey there's some pretty good DS games that can tide you over a few months. 

Consumers are harsh, you have to be ready for that. 

You can see this issue actually playing right this second in real time ... Microsoft just annouced that Halo Infinite will be delayed so now they are in some real trouble I think. You know Sony is going to look to attack when ever they see blood in the water. So now we'll see how good their management team really is because that is definitely a tight spot to be in. 

If I was advising them I'd say they have to spend some money now and buy some period of exclusivity for a 3rd party game that can be positioned as a marquee launch title. That's gonna hurt the wallet, but you have to do what you have to do. 

Then I guess I don't understand what you are trying to say.  "The success of these consoles solidified the respective company's presence in the market." is just clearly not true regarding the following generation for Sony.  Which as I understand it, is the whole point of this thread.  Generational transition.

Moving this back toward Nintendo as in the OP, the way I see it, Nintendo had 3 realistic options.

1. Do exactly what they did.
2. Delay Wii U games or even the Wii U launch to develop additional Wii games.
3. Cutoff the development of Wii games even sooner to focus more on Wii U game development.  Possibly moving some Wii games over to the Wii U, or maybe cross launch games like they did with Twilight Princess or Breath of the Wild.

And the unrealistic option I seem to be seeing support for which no one has actually verbalized.
4. Just develop more games.  My question, is how?  There has to be a give and take somewhere.  Unless people are trying to advocate for Nintendo to build more development teams, which I won't argue against.  It is just that that process would have had to start long before, probably around the launch of the Wii, or maybe within a year or two after.  Nintendo has probably been too conservative in this regard, but I view this as tangentially related, not really directly related to the transition.

I don't think the PS2's end of life affected the PS3 in any way one way or the other.

Nobody cares what you did 12 months ago when it comes to making a purchase in the here and now for your gaming needs for the next several years. People don't really look at the past all that much.

They went from a dominant no.1 to a laughing stock no.3 in a blink of an eye, now kudos to them for being in that situation and putting their head down, taking the jeers, and working their ass off for the rest of the generation. 

Can't feel sorry for yourself when that happens.