What should Nintendo have done instead of Wii U?

[Jumpin]

Slownenberg said:

Jumpin said:

I doubt the GameCube was anywhere near profitable. In those years Nintendo was profiting off of its monstrously successful handheld industry, not the failing GameCube.

Gamecube was absolutely profitable. Don't equate sales with profit. Gamecube was profitable while (I believe) PS2 was not. Nintendo sold Gamecube at a profit and obviously made profit off their games. Just because it only sold about 20 million systems doesn't mean it wasn't profitable, it was just far less profitable than their better selling systems. No aspect of the Gamecube pipeline was unprofitable.

Actually, sales DO matter on profit when you have a company the size of Nintendo with billions of USD cost in annual expenses which include salary, taxation, operating expenses, corporate expenses, utilities/machinery/travel/property, licensing, R&D, marketing, etc. Most of which was dedicated to their home console business, not handheld. It happened that handheld generated many times more revenue and was able to prop up the company while the home console business failed.

For example, Nintendo's R&D for their home console business alone in 2004 was 180M USD (of a total of 191M USD that year), Gamecube cost 99$USD at retail, and sold 3.92M for the year - R&D alone is valued at HALF of the total Gamecube hardware revenue.

Sorry, Gamecube was nowhere near profitable.