They would survive, but that doesn't mean they should go 3rd party.

Wouldn't new kids take thier place?

Well that's how consoles USED to be. Atari, Hudson, and Sega all used to depend on 1st party to sell thier consoles. Back in the day every console was different. Nintendo is the last of these kind of console manufacturers.

Nintendo has some great franchises, but they need to keep their consoles going. They have more 1st party content than any other big player and by the way things are looking with XBox focusing on windows integration and Sony experimenting with streaming, Ninty might eventually be the only traditional console left for us to enjoy.

The only thing they need is better 3rd party support. Nothing drastic as they need an identity away from the other two, but perhaps Ninty could help fund new IPs developed by third parties that you cannot play anywhere else. I would say that plus a focus on what they have in their first party line up would be more than enough to keep them going.

Rest assured though, Nintendo is probably the most healthy player despite the WiiU. I don't see them going 3rd party anytime soon.

Could they survive?  Sure.  Is that the best move though?  Absolutely not!

Yeah, they'd be fine. They have no problem making good games.

This is my real account, I just have dozens of them that I swap through once one is banned.

Why are you making this comment? Is it just because I said Nintendo games are for kids?

Alt account removed ~ CGI-Quality

I believe like others, they'd thrive.

Imagine reintroducing all their IP's to many gamers and introduce to many more whom never played them? Release a console again a gen after and bam.

Second best trojan horse ever.

I don't really understand why people assume Nintendo would end up like Sega. They are very different companies that would be in very different places if you compared Nintendo of now to Sega of the past.

Personally, I see potential for Nintendo to do well as a third-party, provided they didn't mess it by trying to do something weird (which is possible). As it stands, they occupy a niche that the other publishers aren't very interested in. The average PS4/XO consumer probably isn't going to buy software just because it has Nintendo written on it but it's quite possible that they'll be interested in some of what's on offer. That, and you've got to assume that at least a few hardcore Nintendo fans will grab a different device in order to play Nintendo games.

That being said, I do think so of the hardcore Nintendo-only gamers will discover fun games that they never tried before and over time you'll see less and less of them who feel they have to support every title Nintendo releases. Diffusion will take place.

Yes they would trive. Their hardcore fans would move to ps4/X1/pc if they're not there already and their software sales would increase dramatically.

They would definitely survive. Whether they would thrive is a different issue.

They certainly have the game design expertise to make some of the best games in the industry, but they're behind on a technical level; just look at how long it's taking them to bring out their top franchises on their own hardware. I think they would struggle to get to grips with other hardware especially considering how slow their development periods have been since they switched to HD.

Having said that, they have such a huge back catalog of games they could re-release and re-introduce to consumers that haven't owned Nintendo hardware in the past. That would give them plenty of time to get to grips with different hardware configurations.

Would be a good thing for Nintendo. 
They have proven a lot times that they are better in doing software than hardware.