I trust acti as much as a loan shark...

We know for a fact that Nintendo has replicated success, so it's definitely not a one-off thing. The repeated success stories also have certain things in common, so I don't subscribe to the belief that it's random. What turned Nintendo into a behemoth in the video game business was the NES and Super Mario Bros. The market tends to respond strongly anytime Nintendo goes back to such things. The appeal is the combination of simplicity and depth. That's pretty consistent for successful Nintendo products and the other way around as well; when Nintendo didn't follow those rules, they usually had less successful or outright unsuccessful products.

The above answers why catering to the major third parties of today doesn't go together with the expectations that consumers have at Nintendo, because catering to third parties means that Nintendo has to sacrifice what can be considered the basis of their various success stories. Things look even worse if we add an affordable price as a third fundamental ingredient (and there's plenty of evidence to do just that), because that's outright impossible to achieve with the hardware that third parties demand.

This is Take-Two, not Activision.

Is he really saying that the droughts/the third place performance is intentional? I highly doubt that this was their plan.