You seem to be suffering from /v/brain and think that anything that isn't smashing all previous records and dominating the competition is automatically a flop. As for Mario, it's consistently been the best selling franchise on almost every console Nintendo has released, the main exceptions are getting beat by Pokemon on some of the handhelds. So it's clear that people who buy Nintendo consoles always buy up Mario games. I think what you're missing here is that there's other factors that contribute heavily to whether people buy a Nintendo console at all regardless of what exact software exists on the system.