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magoghm on 12 January 2014
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It seems to me that most people don't realize that Nintendo's business model is different than MS & Sony business model.

Sony & MS business model is focused on selling as many consoles as they can and then collect royalties on each game sold for their console. They both also publish their own games, mainly to provide something which is different from the competition and which can only be obtained by buying their console.

Nintendo's business model is based on selling their own games, and their strategy for selling those games is to also manufacture the consoles on which they sell those games. They do allow third party publishers to publish games for their console in exchange for a royalty, but that isn't their core revenue source.

I'm sure that Nintendo isn't happy at all with the Wii U sales. They would have liked to sell many more, because the larger the installed base the more games they can sell. When they release a new game like Super Mario 3D world they do hope it helps to sell more consoles, but their main concern is how many copies they can sell of that game because that's what they see as their core business.

So how well has Nintendo done as a game publisher for 8th generation consoles? Here is the data I collected from vgchartz (from December 28) for some of the largest publishers on 8th generation consoles:

Activision: 1.74m PS4 + 1m WiiU + 1.35m XOne = 4.09m

Ubisoft: 1.27m PS4 + 1.98m WiiU + 0.68m XOne = 3.93m

Electronic Arts: 1.82m PS4 + 0.21m WiiU + 1.11m XOne = 3.14m

Microsoft: 0m PS4 + 0m WiiU +2.13m XOne = 2.13m

Sony: 1.7m PS4 + 0m WiiU + 0m XOne = 1.7m

Nintendo: 0m PS4 + 13.66m WiiU + 0m XOne = 13.66m

Even if you assume that 5m of those games were bundled with the Wii U, Nintendo has sold over 8m games for their 8th generation console. So, even with the extremely low Wii U sales, Nintendo is right now by far the most successful games publisher on 8th generation consoles.

Looking at those numbers I'd say that Iwata & Miyamoto aren't doing that bad with the Wii U.