I think we're all aware Sony/Nintendo had a partnership in the late 80s which fell apart in the early 1990s, but lets be real too -- that was many lifetimes ago in video game ages.
Hiroshi Yamauchi has passed on and the president of Sony when that contract was signed initially in 1988 has also long since passed away.
Neither Kaz Hirai or Satoru Iwata were even employed by either company (officially anyway) back then. Times change.
Sony has worked with rivals like Panasonic in the recent past too, working with Nintendo again would be no big deal. Honestly the Sony/Nintendo rivalry never got as heated as the Nintendo/Sega one did, and today Mario and Sonic can be in the same game together.
If Sony could get an agreement in place with Nintendo before MS/Apple/Google get to them, it could a huge coup for them too. Not only in terms of absolutely stomping the XBox brand in exclusives, but it could a huge boom to their Xperia/Cell Phone business if they could get the likes of Pokemon, Mario, etc. on a proper gaming phone (with actual buttons). Violent/"dude brosey" games just don't seem to sell on portable devices, people like colorful characters even on iOS (Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Plants Vs. Zombies) ... Sony getting an agreement in place with Nintendo would immediately make such a phone/handheld device unique from everything else on the market.
Yes of course they'd have to split profits with Nintendo, but a potential Sony-Nintendo portable platform with cell phone and non-phone flavors could sell 150+ million units IMO, and even if Sony got a minority stake in the licensing royalities there, it would have to be many, many times more profitable than their current Vita business.
PS4 meanwhile would just flat out dominate the XBox 1 (probably talking PS2 levels of dominance here). Drake, Kratos, Mario, Pikachu, Link, Smash Bros (w/Nintendo + Sony characters?!), Gran Turismo, Sack Boy/Media Molecule all exclusive to one system? Game over.
