Stop, STOP! I know you are typing out some angry comment right now but hear me out. I'm not hating but rather wanted to see what others thought.
So it seems that Nintendo home consoles have lately become just a way for people to play Nintendo games. Nintendo tried to bring over the so called "hardcore" gamers to the Wii U with 3rd party support while still holding on to the Nintendo fans, but it failed. And with the looming release of the PS4 and nextbox, it seems that the Wii U will become a second or third console when Nintendo games are released and the price drops somewhat. This case was similar for the Wii where initially it sold for the amazing motion controls, but later on people really only bought software that was released by Nintendo and used it to as a secondary console to only play Nintendo games. In the end everyone just wants to play the fun Nintendo games.
We have also seen that whatever the Wii did in terms of mechanics, the PS3 and 360 could easily emulate later on in their life cycle with a few peripherals, i.e. Move and Kinect. We are seeing something similar with the PS4 and potentially nextbox where the dual screen technology that Nintendo brought in the gamepad could be replicated by the Vita and smartglass. On top of that the PS4 at least appears to be much more technically capable than the Wii U, which will likely be the case for the nextbox as well. Nintendo's online services are also lagging behind Live and PSN. So in essesnce the Wii U isn't doing anything completely unique from the hardware side of things. Again, it is the software from NINTENDO that people want.
So the final point is: If people are only buying Nintendo's consoles to only really play Nintendo games, and if the console itself is lagging behind competing platforms, wouldn't it just be better for us, the gamers if Nintendo became software only? Then that would mean that we wouldn't have to buy Nintendo platforms only to play Nintendo games while playing the big AAA games on other platforms. It would also mean that Nintendo could potentially reach a larger audience, because they could sell their software to people who may have been unwilling to buy a new platform just to play a specific game but would pick the game up if it was in their platform. Of course they would still have the Nintendo fans buying their games still, just on different consoles.
Now the caviats. Firstly it probably doesn't make much sense from a business perspective to stop selling consoles if they are profitable, which was the case for the Wii. They made a lot of profit on hardware alone. But this isn't the case for the Wii U where it is apparently being sold at a loss, so Nintendo are losing money on HW atm. Also, I suppose we could say the opposite to the above argument where Nintendo has all the 3rd party support the other consoles have as well as their own 1st party. This would theoretically be the ULTIMATE console because Nintendo's 1st party has no competition. And this is what Nintendo wanted to do with the Wii U. But it isn't working. 3rd parties just aren't impressed with Nintendo's platform because it doesn't seem to be matching their vision of what they want from next gen asNintendo didn't make a platform powerful enough. I know there have been instances in the past where Nintendo did release powerful consoles (i.e. Gamecube), but even then they didn't find much success. Your guess is as good as mine on that, but we see that either way isn't working out. So really again software only would be solution to this problem.
What do you think?
