WiiU is 2 years old today, how much do you expect it to last?

[zorg1000]

Soundwave said:

In a way too going to "unifed" approach will be a bit of a relief for Nintendo, now they don't have to worry about the console division constantly or have it be a drain on their bottom line, or having to sell a home console alone to developers, consumers, and support it with an entirely distinct library and try to continually make a sales pitch for it when consumers keep ignoring it. 

If people buy the home variant, great, it's like icing on the cake. If they don't, so be it, Nintendo can still all their games to the 60-80 million people that will buy the portable variants.

Right now they have to do all this heavy lifting trying to convince people to buy a console and build its userbase to 20-30 million+ so that they can sell games like Pikmin 3 and Mario 3D World to a decent sized userbase.

Unless they have a miracle gimmick like a Wiimote that catches on at exactly the right time (with no competetion around), they really have had all types of headaches trying to convince people to buy their home console for the last 12-13 years. 

I have to imagine in a way Nintendo is looking forward to the Fusion/Unified Nintendo Hardware-Era because it frees them of that stress of having to push a console division, it must be like try to push a giant boulder uphill for them. 

Yep, outside of huge Nintendo fans (like myself), Wii U isn't worth a purchase at $299.99 for a handful of key exclusives per year, especially when u can get a Nintendo handheld for about half that with software prices being about 50% less and has like 10 times the amount of games.

Another thing to consider is that development time/costs rise significantly with the jump to HD. Nintendo's next handheld is likely to be HD so that means Nintendo has to develop games for two separate HD devices which will make their software output problems even worse and then they will have two devices with droughts between major 1st party releases. With this unifed approach where all games release on either variant, we could feasibly see a release schedule like 3DS had in 2013 every year.

Also this pretty much fixes Nintendo's 3rd party support problem that they have had with their consoles. Nintendo handhelds have always gotten strong support from Japanese 3rd parties and get a bunch of kid-friendly western 3rd party releases every year.

Basically it comes down to iOS/Android for low-budget <$1 games, PS/XB/PC for $50-60 AAA titles and Nintendo Fusion for $30-40 mid-level gaming. Nintendo 1st parties+hardcore Japanese 3rd parties+kid friendly western 3rd parties+indies+virtual console gives Nintendo a very strong software library.