Well, the Snes was a mass market product but the n64 wasn't. And yes, Sony gave them what they wanted and Sony had a lot more money than Nintendo which is why Nintendo should have taken it more seriously when countless amounts of developers requested things.

And yes, there was a lot of marketing and etc involved but MS needed to get their foot hold in the market and the best way to do that is through third parties (and obviously marketing but everyone had marketing of some kind, even Nintendo). Cause the thing is, while MS and Sony had their own first party exclusives, they really aren't as good as Nintendo's. Like yes, they are great in their own right but none of them can really sell as consistantly through out the generations as Nintendo's have been. I feel like if Nintendo listened to the third parties in the n64, the ps1 and n64 would have switched sales because the n64 would have had great third party games + great first party games vs a brand that has not been in the space before. If they started it with the GC, it wouldn't have had similar sales as the ps2 but it certainly would have sold more than it did. Yes, it was easy to develop for and etc but its caviats and not listening to third parties with its mini discs resulted in MS coming close. And yes, it was also a number of other factors as well but if Nintendo had as much third party support as MS did, they would have really sold a lot more than xbox

"Because, in the end, power doesn’t matter. They will go where they see an opportunity to make the highest profits."
See, thats the thing though. With every generation comes new game engines that are used to develop games. When the developers transitioned from the 6th gen to the 7th gen, all the new engines with new games were built around the power of the ps3/360 so porting the games inbetween those two consoles would be easy because the game engines were built in order to use that much power and both of those consoles were similar in power. The issue with the wii is that when developers had to make games for the wii, they couldn't use the engines they made for the ps3/360 and they had to develop a seperate engine just for wii. And when you develop a seperate engine for the wii it costs money so the big publishers up there didn't bother cause the cost of building its own engine for the wii would out weigh their gains from it and the same goes for the wiiU. And there are plenty of games that just aren't capable of running on the wii, you can't have games like skyrim, GTA and etc running on there without cutting out a lot of things completely so it really wouldn't have made them the highest profits at all because the amount of development resources that it would cost them to port it on the wii would be too much because of how underpowered it was. And sure, some publishers did it anyway but thats why most didn't

It was a "really easy" compared to the ps3/360 most likely because the 360 used a PowerPC architecture kind of like the wiiU. The issue is that as more and more devs got the devkits from ps4/x1. And you can be like, "oh but they are still developing some games for the last gen consoles" but the issue with the wiiU is that it has too many issues for developers to develop for them with little in return. They have to optomize all their games and engines so that it would adapt to the wiiU's OS/api. On top of that, they have to adjust their games so that it doesn't take up much space cause the ps3/360 has 200+gb of internal storage for tons of install files but the wiiU only has 28gbs. And most of all, it has no longivity in the eyes of the developers/publishers. Why go through all this trouble to optomize game engines when they will let go of the 7th gen soon enough? The developers and publishers made all these game engines for the next gen which can't be optomized for the wiiU because it doesn't have enough power and while they can try last gen engines, they won't be getting much longivity from those engines in the future for them to even bother to spend the development resources in doing so. Of course, if someone covers the cost of the "optomizations", they will gladly do it

The ports wasn't the only thing wrong with it, the games themselves were missing content as well as getting delayed. Even games like Rayman got delayed! People weren't buying third party games not because the ports had some hitches but rather they were missing content on the wiiU while everyone else, they had plenty of content that werent missing.

And Nintendo didn't listen to the third party developers or else the wiiU wouldn't be what it is from a hardware prespective... There have been countless interviews through out the years of developers wanting an easier architecture to work on and whats easier than PowerPC? x86! And even the public knew this was a thing for a while now so there is no way Nintendo couldn't have known. On top of that, just look at how close the ps4 and x1 is and how far the wiiU is. The wiiU launched only a year earlier, it shouldn't have been that different if they listened to the third parties. Instead, they went for their own thing with a low SoC and a gamepad which costs half the price of the console... Heck, its so low power than external hard drives require two usb ports in order to power themselves. There is no way Nintendo listened to the third parties with the wiiU period. Low storage, low power, completely different architecture and so many other things while if you look at MS and Sony, they both listened to the third parties and thats why their consoles are so close. The only real difference are the resolutions in the multiplat games, everything else is basically the same. The wiiU launched at $350 which is the current price of the x1, there is no way that it was out of Nintendo's reach if they didn't have the gamepad.

Even if they left gates open for third parties (which they didn't considering the policies of the wii), they need to do more. They need to make a console that third parties will be happy with or else they won't bother with it cause as you said, they only want money and if a console requires more work for them to develop for, they won't bother cause that will mean less money for them. And of course third parties won't create it by themselves, Nintendo needs to be the one that does it by getting the third parties to develop on their platform by doing the things I have said many times.

It really won't be safer because as they experience delays and delays and delays, people won't buy their hardware because the bad press will be all over those delays... A better thing to do would be to get the third parties to fill in the gap in between their exclusives and then assign a team to do these realistic games. That way, the press and gamers will be happy with the games and they can take their time with realism. Also, splitting the staff between two systems won't be much of an issue because of the unified OS/API. The staff can work on muliple games on either platform at once since the engines will work on both handheld and consoles due to the unified OS and the engine that will adapt to both architectures. The only thing they would have to do is work a bit more on the console in order to show off the full strength of it. It will speed up development significantly and the end result will be that the console with plenty of first party and third party games.

And the thing is, just because a game doesn't break even on one platform doesn't mean it will break even on the other due to the userbase... Why? Its simple because the Fusion that you are suggesting is targetting Nintendo fans! So if the Nintendo fans don't buy a game on one platform, they sure as hell won't buy it on the other because the tastes will be similar. W101 and Bayonetta 2 wouldn't have sold well even if it was on the 3ds because the 3ds is owned by Nintendo fans which don't care about those games proven by many third party games that don't do well on the 3ds either. There are only certain games that do well on Nintendo platforms in terms of non-Nintendo like games and just because Nintendo will be developing these games doesn't mean they will sell well.

BF isn't really seen has a cod clone cause it does enough things to set itself apart. And even if it is seen as one, the sales don't come anywhere close to Cod either so that doesn't even matter. And again, third parties won't bother just like how they didn't bother with the wii with its large success because it wasn't a third party friendly console. If anything, third party would be even less inclined cause they will see it as Nintendo once again, not listening to them which has been the case since forever

Sooo, just some weird thoughts...

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Another concern could be the price. Yes, it would be the biggest power gap between two Nintendo handhelds, but I think it's not impossible in 2016/2017 at a 200-250€ price tag. Maybe two 480p screens at first and a 720p or 1080p upper screen in later revisions. They could use flash modules that would work on normal Wii U consoles with an USB adapter.

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