from IGN:

Opinion: Those who believe Nintendo should go software-only are just plain bonkers.

The common narrative of Nintendo vs. Apple is clear. Nintendo, master of portable gaming since the 1980s, is a spent force. Apple is the new king of the world. Blah blah blah. Analysts and investors are falling over themselves, urging Nintendo towards giving up their IP to smart-phones.

We're told that the sooner Nintendo admits it's whipped, the better for everyone. It's time for Nintendo global president Satoru Iwata and pals to admit defeat, to bring Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda to the slobbering iOS hordes, to profit from its luscious IP.

But this arc ignores one simple fact - this is Nintendo we are talking about.

Nintendo isn't so much a mere corporation, it's a cultural touchstone. It's not a company, it's a force of nature. Nintendo does not exist to simply create wealth for itself, it exists to create wealth for itself through the exercise of power . It's not enough for Nintendo to make money. It must make money in a manner of its choosing.

Nintendo executives do not hop on planes to grovel and scrape before the likes of Steve Jobs. Nintendo execs wreak change in the world through the force of their imagination and their will to dominate interactive entertainment. Nintendo has no history - none whatsoever - of allowing other companies, rivals, to profit from its IP.

Yes, we are seeing Pokemon make tentative moves onto non-Nintendo portable devices, but this is a very limited exercise and, strictly speaking, Pokemon is developed and maintained by a separate company to Nintendo.

The company has repeatedly stated that it does not want to do business with Apple, and does not see low-cost portable games as part of its future.

No, Nintendo will not go quietly into the night. It is not weak and supine, like the Sega of old. It will never surrender its right to produce hardware, not until the very last desperate opportunity to continue has been explored.

It's true that dedicated game devices are beginning to look beaten by the dominance of smart-phones and tablets. Certainly, 3DS and Wii U do not, at the moment, look anything like as promising as DS and Wii did a few years back during their heyday.

But Nintendo has faced impossible odds before and has prevailed. In the 1990s, the same voices who are calling for the company to go games-only, were urging Nintendo to quit the hardware business before the unstoppable might of PlayStation. If that had happened, we would never have seen Wii or DS, which have been some of the bestselling platforms in the history of the industry.

Nintendo's genius for games creation is inseparable from its activities as a toy-maker, as a manufacturer of hardware. It is fanciful and wrong to believe that Nintendo can turn itself into just another games maker and retain all the confidence that has poured into its first party games over a period of four decades.

Is Nintendo perfect? Not in the least. It has made some errors in the last few years. Its recent failure to furnish its hardware platforms with sufficiently awe-inspiring games has been a mistake. But Nintendo has fouled up before and it has recovered from its own limitations.

It may be that the world only wants to play games on devices that are built primarily for other functions. It may be that Nintendo is eventually forced out of the hardware business. But - and this is important - Nintendo does not believe that to be the case. Nintendo will never surrender.

Link

History repeats itself and Nintendo proves them wrong every time.

I remember back in the early 1990s people were predicting the end of videogame consoles because PCs were getting to be inexpensive enough that everyone would have one in their home; and if people had a PC why would they spend the money to buy another system to play videogames on. While there was some truth to their predictions, after all the PC gaming market was very stong in the 1990s, in the long run the console market has retained and expanded upon its dominance.

The next Nintendo console is always going to be the last one.

I like this article, even though im not into the worship of Ninty, there just another corporation to me, but im sure it was hyperbole

Any publicly traded company can of course be persuaded to do anything, but i agree with the article of course. The problem is investors of today are growing more shortsighted, and bitch and moan today that Nintendo isn't making what would indeed be an easy, quick buck by just ROM-dumping some of their key virtual console selection onto the iStore, to the detriment of their long-term brand-strength or their later ability to make real money off their products

Why do they keep saying Nintendo's model is older? ios model for games is similar to atari's back in the 80's than anything else. The only thing that may keep that from crashing  is that the devices are not dedicated for gaming.

True even Wii and DS didn’t look promising at the beginning  

I'm not sure the article is serious.

dammit Wii move aside and make way for the WiiU.

Well I havent been a big supporter of Nintendo as of late, I would be really bummed to see them gone from the console market