The way I see it is, if Nintendo does decide to go head on in the home console market space, it better sell or their home consoles would be a lost cause.  Nintendo loves to make money, they aren't keen on losing it and that's how they've stayed afloat for so long. The guys know how to rake in the dough. But it's coming to a point where relevence is almost as important as sales. We're not at that point yet for Nintendo but I see us getting there soon. They need to make a console that fits the needs of ALL developers but with their own network, etc. ...I don't see it happening. Honestly, I think Nintendo going 3rd party for home consoles wouldn't be a half bad idea but Iwata knows best I guess.

The point is not how many but that nintendo got multiplats once in a time and still lost. The wiiu would be happy even receiving half as much of the third party support like the gamecube got. Since OPs logic is so more multiplats nintendo gets so more dominant they should be but the gamecube debunks it.

No, the entire point is about how many and if the biggest ones are there, there's no way around it.

the gamecube got even exclsuive games like resident evill and mgs franchises, how is it not big. And still the logic is so more you have so more you should be sucessfull

If, if , if....If Sony released PS4 at $10 then they'd have 95% marketshare...if Nintendo had 3rd party support and powerful hardware they might have more market share then they do now... Both are about as likely to happen though. The N64 and GNC was both more powerful than the PS at the time and still bombed. No third party will support Nintendo because Nintendo had alienated them far too long ago. The only company out of the three likely to bow out of the console business is Nintendo, that's reality unfortunately, if's aside.

Yes, in other news if the Wiiu was $9.99, twice as powerful as the PS4 with tremendous third party support it would hold a ton of marketshare. There's always a situation where Nintendo could blow out the competetion, they're just incredibly unlikely - as is Nintendo getting PS2 level of exclusive games.

The ps2 came before, got all the multiplatforms, got gta, got final fantasy, dragon quest, nearly all jrpgs...

Fact stands that the gamecubedidn't have good third party support. it was almost good when considering the N64 but not quite there.

Agreed, again. Burek posted about Nintendo's mobile venture on the first page. I see it in a much different light. Nintendo's mobile strategy, if profitable, could be used to subsidize their console business, instead of outright replacing it. I think at this point, relevence is as important as sales. Right now, with ~9.2 million sales after 9 quarters on the market, and poor 3rd party sales across the board, Nintendo has lost any sway it had with developers and retailers. A (some?) retailer(s) (Asda, in the UK, IIRC) stopped stocking the Wii U and 3rd party have basically abandoned the Wii U due to poor sales across the board. If we want to draw parallels to Sony's recovery of the PS3, we'd best turn our attention to the Xbox One. Both dropped unnecessary fluff (PS3: PS2 back-compat; XB1: manditory Kinect), boosted 1st party output, and fired the people responsible for the initial problem (PS3: "Crazy" Ken Kuturagi; XB1: Don Mattrick). Nintendo needed to panic, then course correct, and they didn't. At this point, I do not forsee the Wii U overtaking the GCN. If I was asked in 2013 or 2014, I'd say that they still have options. In 2015 and beyond? No, now, their competitors are too entrenched (30+ million sales between them), the Wii U is too "different" (see next part), and the PS4/XB1/PC ecosystem is too lucrative to give up.

On the second bolded, part of what Nintendo's problem is that they make hardware for themselves first and foremost. Sony and MS get 3rd party developers involved in their design process. MS reportedly added, in the 11th hour, 256 extra MB of RAM at Epic's behest (they had shown a prototype of Gears of War running with 256 and 512 MB of RAM). And on the software side, the software implementation of clipmapping devised by Carmack after reading this 1998 SGI paper on clipmapping (back on HW considerations, Rage used 1 thread to decompress JPEG -> DXT. It was a workable solution because the X360 CPU has 6 threads). AMD later implemented this in hardware under the name "partially resident textures." It was later added to the D3D 11.2 spec under yet another name ("tiled resources").

Nobody is going to drop out of the console race. Microsoft and Sony have carved their market out.

If anyone drops out it is nintendo, and even then I think they're going to take another crack at it.

Revived by me the OP, as a response to the NX rumors.