One consideration for Nintendo that many people don’t take into account is that they probably don’t want to release new hardware too close together because getting a platform off of the ground and establishing it in the market takes a lot of resources. This was probably one of the reasons why there was a 2 year gap between the release of the Nintendo DS and the Wii. Now, the question that arises from this is which platform is the most viable in the long term.
Realistically, I don’t have an answer to this, but I think that the bizarre behaviour of many third parties may be the biggest threat to the viability of the Wii; and this actually may be intentional. While it seems foolish to try to push a highly popular console to an early grave (especially with its low development costs allowing for more, more profitable, games) the reasoning behind it could be that consolidating resources around fewer games and increasing the potential user base of those games would increase revenue while reducing costs and return many of these companies to the profitability they previously knew.
