Ultimately, it's all revenue for a company, regardless of where it's coming from based upon a company's business model.

For Nintendo, they don't sell hardware at or below cost, so every sale is profit earned. Of course their internally developed and published IPs are responsible for generating a significant portion of overall revenue and profit. Add merchandising to those IPs and they have a pretty healthy business model, even if it's not based upon high growth.

It's understood by all that the key advantage to producing and selling a proprietary gaming platform is to generate licensing revenue from developers, simply for the privilege of being able to publish on that platform, and this is the only real area in which Nintendo's business suffers from the standpoint of what they could be generating. 

But Nintendo has always been the fiercest competitor on their own hardware platforms for third party developers and publishers, to the point where some developers who can't find a profitable sub-niche market within the Nintendo market choose to skip the Wii U altogether. It's not "lazy developers" or "anti-Nintendo bias," there are simply a lot of instances of publishers who have been unable to generate sufficient profit by releasing their games on Nintendo consoles relative to Sony or MS consoles to offset the added cost of developing and publishing on a riskier, lower potential yield platform. 

So Nintendo has to get by with less 3rd party support and their business model should reflect that, leaving the market for their hardware smaller, but still profitable and still large enough for continued support. 

Ultimately, it's all revenue for a company, regardless of where it's coming from based upon a company's business model.

For Nintendo, they don't sell hardware at or below cost, so every sale is profit earned. Of course their internally developed and published IPs are responsible for generating a significant portion of overall revenue and profit. Add merchandising to those IPs and they have a pretty healthy business model, even if it's not based upon high growth.

It's understood by all that the key advantage to producing and selling a proprietary gaming platform is to generate licensing revenue from developers, simply for the privilege of being able to publish on that platform, and this is the only real area in which Nintendo's business suffers from the standpoint of what they could be generating. 

But Nintendo has always been the fiercest competitor on their own hardware platforms for third party developers and publishers, to the point where some developers who can't find a profitable sub-niche market within the Nintendo market choose to skip the Wii U altogether. It's not "lazy developers" or "anti-Nintendo bias," there are simply a lot of instances of publishers who have been unable to generate sufficient profit by releasing their games on Nintendo consoles relative to Sony or MS consoles to offset the added cost of developing and publishing on a riskier, lower potential yield platform. 

So Nintendo has to get by with less 3rd party support and their business model should reflect that, leaving the market for their hardware smaller, but still profitable and still large enough for continued support. 

Well I also don´t think X1 will have 500k for September... or that it will sell 2.8M more than WiiU until the end of the year... as a rule of thumbs from some people here... you pick YTD for the first 8-9 months and multiply for something like 1,5-2,5x (more towards 2) and that will be the sale of the last 3-4 months... So that would mean X1 (having sold something less than 1M more than WiiU so far this year) could sell something like 1,5M to 2,5M more than WiiU, I would bet more towards the low end. that would have X1 and WiiU virtually tied at the end of the year.

I'm a lot more pessimistic about the XOne, because I doubt this rule of thumb fully applies here, I mean this year, for the XOne and the Wii U. This average sales for 9 month is massively based on the few first months of the year, when the XOne was still in its 6 months from launch (and it was a good launch), the PS4 was still in shortage, and the Wii U seemed to be doomed to die.

This average for 9 months totally ignores the current trend, because the average doesn't change so much if it happens for a period where sales are low : currently, the Wii U is comming back and selling more for a few weeks (months ?), and the XOne is having low sales, making them even in sales. Why should the sales to come reproduce the very specific pattern of the post-launch period rather than the current trend ? I think that's one of the reason why the boost can vary greatly around x2, it depends on the dynamic (and shortage) of the console, not just on flat average sales.

Last but not least, the boost can vary greatly not just depending on the year, but also depending on the constructor, and it makes sense to say Nintendo is strong at Christmas sales.

Makes sense. And I hope it is true, cause I am so in love with my WiiU.