The original wii u production figures were quite high as Nintendo were expecting success but the first thing they realised was people were more interested in the 32gb wii u than the 8gb version and there was a greater margin so they stopped production quite quickly of the 8gb version but there were still many to sell through. After 12-18 months I think wii u production stopped completely but there was enough stock to last. They've been re-packaging consoles to freshen them up and limiting stock to last the duration. It would be interesting to know the foxconn numbers for wii u.
It's possibly for NX if the platform fails production will have a limited time. No doubt Nintendo have offered guarantee's to Foxconn about the number of consoles and if it falls too low perhaps they will have to pay money to Foxconn to offset production set up costs.
When you think about it the wii u sold amazingly considering its high cost for a very weak console but Nintendo would have invested big money in R & D that they probably didn't get fully back because of the low sales.
That's one thing that helps Nintendo they maintain a huge profit margin compared to Sony and Microsoft. So failure isn't quite as bad as the wii u may have returned 4-5x the profit back to Nintendo that the PS4 and xbone consoles do so it can sell in less numbers however the low userbase means lower software sales and royalties which is what they would have suffered from most.
I don't see the tablet or tablet with extra box concept working that well myself and wouldn't be surprised if the NX performs worse than wii u so again foxconn production may have a limited run which Nintendo will sell over multiple years.
Nintendo's successful products tend to get refreshes as time goes on, new colours, minor spec changes etc the wii u never got a single revision not even an upgrade of its flash memory from 32gb to 64gb or 128gb which was much needed and I suspect the NX will follow a similar path.
That's based on the either of the 2 NX concepts that have been put forward but I'm certainly hoping that is wrong and Nintendo will do a decent commercial design that will succeed.
