And yet NX is supposed to be successful by doing this (getting 3rd party).

Well there are different definitions of success, is making money part of being successful? Because if you're going to go through the whole bit of trouble of making a platform, spending millions marketing it, etc. etc. I mean this whole business model was invented so that the reward for putting up with that headache was that you got (tada!) licensing fees. For the hassle of developing/designing/marketing/distributing a console, the console maker can enjoy being paid licensing fees from developers. This is kind of an important part of the video game business.

Even if Nintendo isn't the no.1 juggernaut in the business, lets say instead of the 4-5 retail third party games Nintendo gets now on the Wii U/year, they got a more healthy 50/year (this is still a small number compared to Sony/MS which get several hundred third party games per year).

OK, now lets even assume these games don't sell terribly well, lets say on average a pretty shitty 70,000 copies WW. That's not great, but it's something. Lets assume Nintendo collects an $8 licensing fee on each one of those games. 50 titles x 70,000 copies x $8. That's $280 million/year. That's ... not an insigificant amount of money.

That's why you want at least a decent amount of third party support on your platform even if you're not exactly beating Sony for third party king or whatever all or nothing trophy. And the wonderful thing about this is Nintendo gets paid on any retail game no matter what. That ill-advised copy of Carrot Top Fitness? Guess what? Nintendo gets $8 of every single one of those stuck in a Wal-Mart clearance bin whether it ever sells or not.

I suspect also that a large part of Nintendo's future rests largely with Microsoft. What is Microsoft going to do in the future, do they double down on the XBox consoles or do they move out of the console space and give Nintendo some breathing room/oppurtunity?

I also think it's imperative that NX be a platform, not a fixed singular console or handheld, if its a fixed piece of hardware then yes what happened to the Wii U will inevitably probably happen to the NX where people won't support it because it's basically a generation late. If it's an evolving ecosystem with upgradable or evolving hardware, then that's a bit of a different ball game, then Sony can't simply go "where here's PS4.5 or PS5" because Nintendo in effect has made the hardware dick waving contest somewhat irrelevant, it would be like a car maker bragging about having air conditioning as a feature.

right.  and those artists don't usually get paid, let alone get to be part of a multi billion dollar company.  The ones that do get paid usually have someone doing the selling for the. There is a whole division of nintendo and especially NOA that has to decide a target audience.  Sad but true.  

To as many people as possible, but since that didn't work, it looks like they keep on bouncing back and forth

The kind of gamer who is perfectly fine with sitting down with a console which had less internal storage available to games than my N-Gage had but they countered that by not daring release games for it at a rate where you might need to have more than 1-2 of them installed and updated at the same time.

Also in terms of power they seen that the main rival in terms of power for the Wii was the PS3 and Xbox360 so they designed the console to be marginally more powerful than those systems (in some aspects, not harddrive again QQ) was just a shame that the X1 and PS4 were coming around the corner with upgrades for 3rd party games such as 16x more RAM under the hood than their older brothers, basically instantly murdering the idea of easy ports to the Wii-U of games directed at the Core gamers they hoped for.

And finally it was aimed at people who would be fine to just sit and wait while they fumbled about, a 2015 with less than 20 seconds of the Wii-U Zelda game shown, a 2016 with the sad news that game isn't coming til mar 2017 and even then... the Wii-U will be the inferior place to play the thing, a sequel to the 3DS handheld Mario Title.... A Toad game! a 3 year in the making reboot/remake of Lylat Wars,

Damn... this got ranty, I think for me the Wii-U itself was not the issue in terms of Power/Gamepad though, I think the number 1 issue which happened to the Wii-U was Nintendo simply were not able to support a HD console, the jump to designing worlds with assets over 480p clearly dealt them a major knock and if the NX is going to be a true 1080p system I think unless there is major changes... or recruitment going on at Nintendo, expecting it to have anything other than a trickle of games is foolhardy.

(Unless it ends up having that 3ds cartridge port rumour which was going around the place and on day one it literally allows you to play the entire 3ds library on the big screen possibly with tidied up AA added everywhere to keep the image bearable on the big screens, that would be one amazing library on day 1 of a console.)



TL:DR - Ninty failed at HD games, utterly failed.

I have no idea what were they thinking with the Wii U. I would love for the people at Nintendo to explain what the thought process was.

Nintendo makes great games, I basically just appreciate them for that.

As far as a corporate entity ... they went batshit insane years ago. It's a bunch of clueless old Japanese farts on their board of directors hilariously trying to cope with a business that's basically Western teenagers/adults. It's kind of like your grandma trying to pick out what clothes you should wear.

It's probably better if you can seperate Nintendo the game maker from Nintendo the corporation. One is very good at what they do, the other is exceedingly incompetent.

Very well put, if they were able to divide boardroom and design room it could be very good for them and their customers both loyal ones and new ones.

But Nintendo the game maker IS Nintendo the corporation. And even a clueless old fart can't possibly be as stupid as to think casuals would want a controller that looks like a tablet but has none of the functionality of the tablet.

And yet, a LOT of the more popular 3rd party games (such assassin's  creed and COD) sold well over 70,000 and they decided it wasn't really worth their time and effort to port newer games. Why would it be any different for NX?