Third parties honestly don't make that much money.

Rockstar which has the biggest third party IP is about a $1.5 billion company ... Nintendo is a $18-20 billion company in assets ... they would be nowhere near as large if they were just a third party developer, even if they were the biggest one.

^This

Nintendo really should buy ubisoft.. Doing this solves multiple problems..
1. Gives them a western presence
2. Would help with game droughts
3. Gives them multiple exclusives and gamers in the west more incentive to buy nintendo hardware.
4. Would fill the gap for genres nintendo does not produce in
5. Gives them an European and 2nd party presence almost as big as Rare.
6. Gives nintendo a group of people who know how to program HD and could lend a hand in game development of franchises not named mario or zelda

1. Fire the entire marketing division.
2. Hire a new marketing division.
3. Create new studios with young blood to make new and exciting IPs
4. Get the Wii U to $199 ASAP
5. Nintendo Directs every month
6. Build relations at home and in the West (the support doesn't have to be Battlefield 4 level but at least make sure stuff like EA's sports games will appear on the Wii U)
7. Build excellent relations with indie developers
8. Improve the online structure ten fold
9. Make sure Europe doesn't get left out
10. Fund developers to make exclusive games that normally wouldn't be able to happen
11. Put Gamecube and Wii games on the Wii U eshop and DS on the 3DS eshop
12. Outsource F-Zero and Star Fox to other devs
13. Buy some devs
14. Buy some IPs
15. Seriously a lot of buying stuff
16. Make the brand appeal to everyone again

Great ideas, but one question, $199 for a Wii U with or without the Gamepad? Also, the relations with the indies is doing alright at the moment.

Stage one of my "Rescue Nintendo" presidential term- Buy a few gaming companies. I would grab up NIS and Marvelous. They have fun, niche games that could do much better with a big marketing scheme. I would also begin selling the gamepad in stores.

Stage two- Flood the market! At least one new 1st party game a month, per system. Could be another Mario spin-off, New IP, something from one of the new companies we've purchased. If the 3rd parties aren't there, we will be!

Stage three- New system plan and rollout. I would have a new Handheld out in 2016. Low price-ish ($199.99). Get some major titles on it on launch day to show we are for real with this. Then, in 2018 bring out the new console. It would have NOTHING to do with the Wii name. The controller for the system would be the handheld system, one also bundled with the system. By this time, the handheld would have dropped in price, making it a bit cheaper. This would be priced at $399.99, and have a free download of a current popular handheld game. This way people could have access to all of our games by purchasing the system. People could take the games everywhere they go with a cross-play option.

If possible with the gamepad, I'm not it's biggest fan of it but they might as well stick with it. Alternatively they could make a redesigned model which would could cut down on cost to make a more realistic idea. Their indie relations is one of their strong points but they should continue to invest into it, having an XBL like marketplace full of indies would be great.

On that topic Nintendo needs to start putting harddrives into their system if they're going to go down that path, making people buy external items can be a turn off.

Yeah, I don't understand where people get this notion that Nintendo would be better off solely as a 3rd party developer, it's ridiculous.

I added all the sales for the 100 top selling games of 2013 by publisher (data from vgchartz), here are the results:

Nintendo:   43,517,699    (23 games)

Take-Two Interactive:   37,109,991    (8 games)

Electronic Arts:   27,755,029   (17 games)

Activision:   26,275,410   (10 games)

Ubisoft:   14,606,868   (9 games)

Sony Computer Entertainment:   10,804,710   (6 games)

Microsoft Game Studios:   8,531,017   (5 games)

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment:   7,126, 639   (7 games)

Square Enix:   5,643,427   (4 games)

Capcom:   3,998,650   (2 games)

Deep Silver:   2,052,994   (2 games)

Bethesda Softworks:   1,838,369   (2 games)

Disney:   1,821,103   (2 games)

GungHo:   1,158,389   (1 game)

Konami Digital Entertainment:   1,075,195   (1 game)

Namco Bandai:   914,870   (1 game)

Nintendo, even on a year with sales well below their expectations, is still by far the largest game publisher. But, this doesn't stop a bunch of clowns all over the Internet from trying to tell Nintendo how they should run their business.

I would turn Nintendo into a private company.