How much hardware does Nintendo need to sell per generation to remain relevant?

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Zekkyou said:

Paatar said:
As Eric said above, they just need to be profitable. If they are, viola. They won't go anywhere. Plus, they'd have to unprofitable for years on end before they decided to quit the console business.

That's not entirely true. While profit is obviously the end goal, the profit being made needs to be large enough that the company can justify the resources being put into it. They have share holders to think about.

This. Going for a goal of 20m consoles per generation or so would mean taking a lot of risk for a small profit, it means limiting potetial sales of software it means not being able to react if a new competitor erodes a relevant marketshare (like tablet did to DS). At that point it would really be wiser going 3rd party.