Portable plus combining the scope/scale of big ticket Nintendo console experiences (something couldn't be previously done) has been the a successful combo for Nintendo.
Home console market in a traditional sense has been a rough go for them since the SNES because people want in part a home console to be like a DVD/VCR/television appliance and they always have. They want wide variety of content, they don't want to be told "well you can't have this game or that channel" ... the responsibility of the "big box console" even the NES/SNES was to provide the widest breadth of content and then let the consumer decide what they want. It's the same way no one would want a speciality TV that only showed a few channels even if one of the channels being shown was fantastic in quality. So Sony took over that aspect of the market, but Nintendo defended the portable side of their market well until smartphones became a problem about 10 years ago.
Switch addresses the rise of mobile gaming eating away at the traditional handheld market by going upmarket, you can't really play games of the scope/scale of Breath of the Wild or even really Mario Kart 8 on mobile, no one would give away games like that for free. And Nintendo looks like they are continuing to ensure they'll have a good gap here as mobile games improve and consoles are getting better, Nintendo looks to be upgrading the current Switch significantly to be able to display 4K games and likely better fidelity, which keeps the product unique. There is nothing on the mobile market that's going to have 4K games like BOTW2 going forward. Very astute of Furukawa to go this route, gotta keep your hardware fresh and not rest on your laurels.
For this past year, also COVID no doubt has had a monstrous impact, it's the biggest global event since World War II and it set up for Nintendo's purposes in an unplanned way pretty much perfectly ... the world went into lock down basically around March 2020, just as Animal Crossing released. That's just an extremely fortunate turn of events. Then for the rest of the 12 months, the lineup Nintendo has had has been mediocre (Musou game as their big holiday title, a new Paper Mario as really their only medium sized release, no big scale releases) but it hasn't really mattered. They're also in the middle of their product cycle so they have much more inventory to sell, MS/Sony who are selling out of every PS5/XBS are seeing benefit too but they're basically bottlenecked by not having enough supply because those are brand new systems. So the timing isn't really as great for them.
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