Ha.   Yet none of you post any facts or figures, its all opinion and pro nintendo hopes and dreams of their invincibility and how they can lose money for decades.   There is no debate its all ninty so great so awesome they cant fall, yet far greater corporations have fallen before.  

but but but 

User has been banned ~StarOcean

I know they won their generation. what i meant was that the Wii was the only one with God-like numbers.

It's not as though Nintendo is struggling everywhere. They're doing well in Japan. They are a Japanese company. I just think that they need to have some flexibility with their consoles when it comes to the US. 

The Eastern and Western market are extremely different. I think Nintendo needs to see that before advancing further.

I don't think they would. These are basically games designed to diversify their system library so that people buy their platform to also buy their other - more popular - titles. They aren't produced to make huge profits. Without the incentive of selling hardware, Nintendo would make Mario, Zelda, Pokemon yearly and forever. Like pretty much every other third party publisher, they would stick with their stable IP's and only try new titles out of artistic curiosity, but with the contraints that they must be profitable. Furthermore, Nintendo does not have the control over the hardware that they are used to, limiting their ability to develop for the platform to its fullest extent. 

Possibly there would be gains by not having hardware development costs (albeit software development costs will rise, and software revenue will decrease due to licensing fees, and such), but ultimately they will probably be negated by the losses. Profit-wise, I would think Nintendo would remain very much the same, but instead of diversity - which we all want from Nintendo, we will have stagnation. 

Overestimation of Nintendo as a publisher, the majority of their IPs are only known because they're on Nintendo platforms. Irregardless of quality, if you take them off (Nintendo Platforms), they'll just get wiped out by the multi platform sea, and like an iceberg you'd only see the top of Nintendo's IPs like Mario and Zelda.

Addendum:

In fact, none of the big 3 would probably do well as a third party, especially not Sony.

I think one of the biggest hurdles for Nintendo in the west is NoA's insistence in trying to portray Nintendo as the kid-friendly alternative (which ironically tends to drive away kids and teens) instead of an age neutral console that focuses on gameplay and fun -- because that's their strongest selling point.  Hell, if I were a marketer, I'd start a campaign where I'd put a magnifying glass on Nintendo's emphasis on fun over cinematic experiences and narrative-based games where you spend more time watching than actually playing.

Imagine Square Enix teaming up with Nintendo to create an amazing Pokemon game for all the consoles.

I'd buy that immediately

Considering there is a saturation point for the # of fans, I really don't see the sales increasing that much. If you noticed, many of their franchises didn't sell that much more on the Wii (with a 101 million install base) than they did on the Nintendo 64 with a 30 million install base. Why? The people who want to play these games already buy Nintendo platforms. Sure, there will be gains, but not as huge as people make it seem, probably somewhere between 15-30% more sales, but with more costs for multiplatform development on expensive platforms to remain competitive (software-wise) and also with less revenue (licensing fees.) You'll see many low to mid-end Nintendo franchises like Fire Emblem, Xenoblade Chronicles, and Metroid stripped out of their development cycles, and a huge emphasis on Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon. That is not good for gamers who enjoy Nintendo games. It also doesn't necessarily mean their profits will go up. 

People say this all the time. They must realize that this is not logically contained nor is it statistically sound. 

1. Why isn't it logically contained? Any counter-example destroys a deductive proof (which is what people are trying to make here.) We can argue based on induction, which alludes to the next point. 

2. Why isn't it statistically sound? The sample size is VERY VERY small, and the external market system in which Nintendo is selling these platforms has changed over the last thirty or so years. 

There is nothing preventing NX from selling more than the Wii U, for example. There is no mystical process assuring Nintendo will sell fewer platforms with each consecutive one. Markets and demand curves don't follow linear rules. They are much more complicated than that. 

Nintendo didn't do anything wrong with the SNES, that system sold less than NES due to real competiton from Sega. The N64 had to face the PS1 which stole the Japanese market from Nintendo due to the lack of JRPGs on the N64 ( went from 17m to 5m in Japan). The GameCube was plagued by many questionable decisions and the same can be said for the WiiU. If NIntendo makes a console that isn't plagued by questionable design choices and that gets at least the support of Japanese 3rd party publishers then I can see it outsell both the WiiU and GC. Heck, even N64 numbers aren't out of the question because such console would perform better in Europe and Japan than the N64, which would make up for the lower numbers in America ( I don't see the NX sell 20m in NA).

I'd actually argue that Nintendo gave away the Japanese market with the N64, by abandoning the joint project with Sony, that ended up losing them Final Fantasy due to refusal to move away from cartridges, which among other things, gave Sony a very easy entrance into the industry.