Anything can happen! But history seems to generally side home consoles to Playstation and even Nintendo (both won/will win 3 generations but Playstation only lost one) and handhelds to Nintendo (ignoring smart devices). But who knows? Very few of us predicted Nintendo would win with the Wii and Microsoft had a good chance this generation but faced the DRM fiasco and high launch price.

Maybe if Sony messes up badly next generation and Microsoft doesn't get involved with a huge media backlash the generation afterwards, Microsoft could win if Nintendo messes up and continues its decline on home console sales.

But this would all have to happen before another paradigm shift affects the game industry which may eliminate the need of home consoles entirely and console wars become publisher/studio wars instead.

Alright then, lets play your game, i'll push the boat out a little further, since you want to stop at comparing entire divisions, the next step is comparing the companies.

Nintendo's market cap : 20.17B
Microsoft's market cap : 353.34B

Thus, Xbox has won every single generation because Microsoft overall ends each year with the most money.

MS is definitely the smartest company out of the 3 yes.

The simple fact of the matter is relative to the OP's topic, Gen 5, 6, 7 and potentially 8's winners are PS1, PS2, Wii, PS4.

Not really sure why that's so hard for you to swallow.

do you truthfully, honestly, 100% actually believe xbox had any chance in the slighest to come anywhere close to ps4's sales even before the drm thing?

Because Nintendo makes HH as well. If they made main Pokémon games for their HC it would sell a lot better.

Nintendo is just a gaming company, even smaller than the gaming division of Sony and maybe even MS (not sure about their size) and has to split their resources into two because they have to support two platforms.

Using operating income of their gaming divisions is the best source we have available right now.

You can't seperate Nintendo's HC from their HH. Doing so is unfair.

Where's the hard proof that GBA + GC was less profitable than just the PS2? Granted, I have no hard proof of the opposite either.

But GBA selling over 80 million units when its succesor already released 3 years later is pretty impressive. The PS2 had 6 years on the market without a succesor. Nintendo sold each GBA for profit and the games were relatively cheap and fast to make. It ùdoesn't see=m that weirùd to =me that the GBA + GC + first 2 years of the DS made more profit than the PS2 and the first year of the PSP.

Debatable, really.

Handhelds should be counted separately as their generations are not synchronized to console generations and (as I already said earlier) they appeal to a widely different audience. Your dogma to combine Nintendo's consoles with handhelds is nothing more than artificial inflation.