Nintendo has "learning 1-2 things from last generation, but making 3-4 new mistakes for the upcoming generation" down to an art form. 

After SNES-Genesis era

"Yeah! Nintendo finally gets it! They're not being outmarketed by Sega anymore! Yeah Play It Loud baby! Killer Instinct with blood. Uncensored Mortal Kombat! Oh yeah Nintendo going 3D too, man wait till you see Mario in 3D!".

Good stuff ... until they proceed to choose cartridges alienating 95% of the development community, losing key allies like Squaresoft and Enix, and handing the generation over to the Playstation. 

After N64-PSX era

"Yeah! Nintendo going with DVDs! Awwww yeah! No more cartridge problem! OMG! Resident Evil exclusivity! Imagine Perfect Dark 2 on this thing!"

Good stuff .... until they decided to make their console look like a purple kids lunchbox, paying for a DVD drive but not allowing DVD movie playback, getting themselves labelled as the "kiddie" platform, letting Microsoft move in onto their FPS fanbase that they had going for themselves with GoldenEye/Perfect Dark, and cutting ties with most of their Western development partners, etc. etc. 

Nintendo "learns" maybe 1 or 2 things each console generation, the problem is they find a way to make twice as many new mistakes the next time around. Remember this doozy of a gif that was paraded around before the Wii U launched?

Ugh. If thats what you call life then you can have it and to each his own.

As funny as that image is it doesnt really adress what i had said.

We wont find out what they learned until their next home console is released, my bet is on "not much" though.

I would say let third party games into your heart and think outside the box. Maybe draw the attention from the control so much and more into the system itself. On the first party software side, they are pretty good.

At the least, they should have learned to not to use the Wii/DS names again

I think in all seriousness their big take away from this gen will be that the console business is too damn hard, and by making their handheld (basically) their home console too, they solve a lot of their headaches.

Because right now when a console doesn't do well it presents a host of problems for Nintendo -- games that you've invested huge amounts of money and resources into like Smash U or Mario Kart 8 or even things like Bayonetta 2 don't sell what you would hope because you don't have a userbase to sell them to. You have to juggle between supporting the console and the portable and sales of both suffer as a result of wishy washy support for both.

You have to market for both seperately. If you have a bad selling console it can also cause manfacuturing/financial losses which is a headache you don't need when you already are trying to squeeze fleeting profit from the portable as is.

Unified platform is the solution, but really what that actually will mean is really Nintendo will make a portable platform. The "home" version will just be the handheld souped up to run games at a higher resolution. But it will be the same games.

So Wii U in a lot of ways will be IMO the last traditional Nintendo home console, as in one that was completely discreet and separate from the handheld line.

I think for Nintendo they will "liberated" by this, selling consoles has caused Nintendo so much strife and headache really from the NES days onwards, and Nintendo doesn't like that. Now if the home version sells good, great, if it doesn't, well not a huge deal, Mario Kart 9 will still have plenty of users to sell to on the handheld side. If the home console doesn't sell well, they're not stuck with a ton of unsold inventory they have to take a loss on, infact if the handheld and home version use the same chips, they could just repurpose the chips/RAM meant for the console version into their handhelds. Some fans may not like it, but I think for Nintendo it will be a big relief. 

The only thing I feel they've learned is to not put casual gamers first, given what Miyamoto said about the casual gamers. Other than that though, nothing.

If Nintendo learned anything, they'd be fixing it right now. We're not seeing any signs of it though.

yeah. even sega supported the saturn. 

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