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Soundwave on 08 November 2016
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

Nintendo sells 70 million portables ... but consoles? Not even close, not unless they have a miracle controller to ride on, and they don't have that anymore. 

Nintendo could still sell Switch, I don't think MS would have any issue with that. That's a portable centric line of hardware pretty far removed from something like the XBox Scorpio. 

40-50 million consoles is still too high for MS to just give up on the brand. That's not "treading water". That's a valuable brand, they have issues globally ... but therein lives yet more incentive to work with Nintendo. 

If XBox was selling 20-30 million tops then OK I could see them abandoning it, but if you're doing above Sega Genesis/SNES numbers, that's just too strong to give up on entirely. 

A distinction between home consoles and handhelds is irrelevant when Nintendo removes said distinction. Switch isn't giving up Nintendo's presence in living rooms and if they can sell 40-50m systems (your threshold), then why should they partner up with Microsoft who bring questionable qualities to the table, but would want a notable share of the money?

Why not sell 50-60 million Switches, and have a big stake in 70+ million XBoxes as well?

Nintendo has had portable centric consoles sell alongside home systems for a long time so that's not really a conflict of interest, the consumer does not give a shit about "marketing distinctions".

People do not want to buy just a Nintendo home console anymore. I don't think they ever did. The NES and Super NES succeeded because they had a wide variety of software, if the NES had only 1st party games and the Sega Master System had its 1st party games + all the third party games that the NES had, it probably would've won that console cycle. Wii succeeded on hitting pay dirt with a controller craze and underserved market that isn't underserved any longer and from what I can tell, Nintendo is out of controller gimmicks, if they had something big it would be front and center part of the Switch. 

If they can get a good deal from MS, I would strongly consider it. A stable 60-70 million console userbase would reap healthy profits for them and ensure a large market presence and they'd still be free to take home all they want from the Switch.