I'm sorry, but comments like these are more facepalm worthy than they should be.

Under Iwata's leadership, Nintendo started making money hand-over-fist and saw their greatest amount of financial success and market dominance between Wii and DS combined since the NES glory days of the late 80s. Under Iwata's leadership, they actually produced MORE new IPs, between in-house dev teams and development partners, than they had in the past decade under Yamauchi. Ignoring the success the company has had with DS, Wii, and 3DS, just to focus on the current situation of Wii U, is cherrypicking of the worst kind. Yes, their new home console isn't in an ideal spot right now, but does that mean we forget all the positives the man brought to the table beforehand? I guess in some people's estimation that is the way to look at things these days.....

Also, Nintendo hasn't lost a single red cent, and are sitting on literally billions in the bank. There is a big difference between posting less money than you predicted to your investors that you thought you'd make in a fiscal year, and actually "losing money". Nintendo is not yet in financial trouble, not even close.

Lots of agreeing to disagree. If you want JRPGs, you've needed a Sony console for the past 2 generations. Nintendo doesn't cater to those people at all. Wouldn't say that GTA, AC, COD are for hardcore gamers. Those are mainly used by the casual 2-3 games/year crowd. This is an entirely different and incredibly off-topic argument tho. Those games Nintendo made didn't really appeal to many as they generally sold terribly. My general response is why can't Nintendo both, because their competition is more than capable of creating games for multiple audiences.

You're describing the mishandling of a studio with your own paragraph on Monolith. They made 2 console games and co-developed a bunch of crossover cash-ins with Banpresto and Namco.That's not how you should manage one of your top studios.

Nintendo has 2 JRPGs announced for WiiU ("X" and Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem), and they have also supported JRPGs and SRPGs for DS and 3DS either through their own games or localizations, as well as producing Xenoblade, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower for Wii. That's what I was refering to. Whether Sony platforms have more or not is irrelevant here, as I was just talking about the kind of gamer Nintendo is currently aiming for.

That aside, Sony has seemingly lost a lot of interest in the genre lately (and has focused on Western games in general), and I'm not going to give them credit for 3rd party games that have nothing to do with them. Even if we extend the argument to Japanese 3rd parties, they have been largely on handhelds (and now smartphones) since DS/PSP, with some of the big franchises going multiplatform on home consoles either partially or completely (most notably Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts). Because of all this, I would say that PS3 is hardly on the same level as PS1 or PS2, which were full of exclusive JRPGs. DS and 3DS (and PSP) are arguably as much of a must have for a JRPG fan if not more (depending on personal taste and language barrier), while Wii and 360 managed to hold their own through a few noteworthy exclusives.

As for this part, Nintendo does cater to multiple audiences, unless you think all those genres and elements I mentioned plus the so called "casual" games are just one audience... In any case, the question here was about how they should expand, and my personal opinion is that they should go for genres that are generally being ignored, instead of trying to go for the same type of games that Sony and Microsoft already offer. Would an FPS fan for example get a WiiU for one or two exclusive FPSs when he already has a PS4/Xbox One ? Would a racing sim attract a good audience with GT, Forza, Project Cars and others out there ? And in the context of the whole industry, is it desirable to have all 3 focused on the same type of games ?

Sony and Microsoft have definitely their own focus too. Both of them are regularly catering to many of the elements I stated before that can be attributed to the stereotypical "hardcore" gamer, with the rest being in general secondary to them. And if we're going to talk about sales, the same standards apply to them. If we're going to minimize the importance of the likes of The Wonderful 101, Sin and Punishment, and Dillon's Rolling Western for their sales, the same applies to Puppeteer, Tearaway, Sorcery, Ninja Blade, and so on. Niche games are in big part what makes the lineups of all 3 of them to have diversity, and you can't claim either of them have a varied lineup if you exclude them.

So sure, agree to disagree. I'll read anything you want to add here if any, but this is my last post on the matter.

My last thought is from your second half. Rather than phrasing the statement this way, why not do it this way. "Why wouldn't a Wii U want an FPS, racing game, open world game, etc?" There's obviously some desire for these games, because even a mediocre FPS like The Conduit was hyped up. Had it been a good game, I think it could have actually sold pretty well.

Red Steel 2 says hi.

Let's be honest, while both Nintendo and 3rd parties deserve blame for not hyping up games or similar issues, I spent an embarassing amount of time on the internet trying to hype up lots of interesting non-first party Wii game that I knew was coming in late 2008/early to mid 2009. Like joining lots of fan communities, every day usually spending an hour or so trying to be part of those communities while also convenietntly talking about some lesser known upcoming Wii titles. And the hypocrisy from hardcore gamers just so they couldn't support new IP or actual 3rd party hardcore titles was so consistently awful it was insane. It really made me incredibly cynical towards most of the gaming community until that time Operation Rainfall tried to get Japanese games over here and support interesting videos games. Gamers had no interesting in getting anything good for Wii that wasn't a Nintendo sequel essentially, I saw that first hand over and over and over. And this is essentially most of my opinion of this. Now excuse me while I play that Little King's Story no one bought, aka a Pikmin like game when people were complaining that Wii wasn't getting a new Pikmin.

Yeah, they certainly had trouble with new franchises like Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and Brain Age in the last generation...

Yes,and those games are the reasons why threads like this exist. When your competition is releasing new games the likes of Uncharted and Gears of War no one's checking for Brain Age and Wii Sports. Microsoft and Sony have long-lasting new games that people can play over and over and make continuing sequels. Nintendo has, well… Gimmicks. Consumers have flocked to Xbox One for Titanfl. How many consoles do you think Nintendogs 2 is going to move?

cant tell if thats a serious comment or not.

More than new IPs, they need more games.
- Big licenses faster, something like MK8 like launch day, most famous IP within a year would be awesome.
Sony and MS are not doing that, but they have 3rd support, and didn't have so many years to prepare while getting so much money from Wii. For that, better development, bigger teams, better tools and dev processes. Welcome to 2014 !

- 3rd party devlopment for less selling/forgotten nintendo licenses.
For Nintendo, F-Zero is a failure in term of sales and in term of quality (the game doesn't add enough). But for me that's a success, it sold well enough, the license could continue, and still has room for a version on every console (networks, extensions, user-made circuits). The same goes for starfox, 1080, etc.

- 3rd party support
Like sponsoring for promising indies, exclusivity for little studios (especially japanese loosing studios), and use money for bigger licenses (you need FIFA, COD). Seeing Onimusha or Valkyria Chronicle again would be awesome.

- smartphone port
Bring money to get port from fun smartphone game that would use the controller directly and in a fun way.

Their success and doom is that they could avoid such changes thanks to the Wii. But Nintendo is now back on the way it was following for GC and N64. I really hope they will not try again and again to restart a Wii-like success. Because I'm not interested in, and because I don't think it will ever work again.

And where are those franchises at now? Fun fact, did you know Brain Age got a sequel on 3DS? Nobody else did because it only sold 40k units, a big drop from the 20m on DS. None of those franchises need sequels, they were perfect for the Wii/DS era and that's it, Nintendo should have focused on making new things rather than trying to catch lightning in a bottle twice.