I never understood the backlash within the last 8-10 years over exclusives. Exclusives are the lifeblood of consoles. They create competition. If there were no exclusives, why would there need to be multiple consoles? What would be the selling point for these consoles? Where would the competition come from? Where would the incentive to do better come from?
Also, Nintendo getting out of hardware would be like Apple getting out of hardware. Nintendo has grown used to controlling everything. They also make hardware for the games they want to make. Sega was able to get around this for a few years by allowing their development teams choose which consoles they wanted to exclusively make games for. This gave them the feeling of working on games for dedicated hardware. After that, Sega changed. Their culture changed. I think giving up hardware played a huge role in that. That could very well happen to Nintendo.
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