It's over 40 years now since the Famicom arrived on the scene; in the decades since, many other hardware makers have dropped out of the race, yet Nintendo is still holding strong after all these years.

In your opinion, why have they managed to remain relevant in the hardware space for so long, when so many others could not?

Well, they did essentially leave the home console market and stopped competing with Sony and Microsoft directly.

But their handhelds? Never failed which kept the company and it's highly awarded intellectual properties at the forefront of gaming.

Ugh, this again? You know I could flip the argument and claim that they dropped the handheld market. The Switch fights both battles, however.

Mario, Pokemon, games for all ages, innovation, consistent quality, and synonymity with portable gaming.

Strong IP, cheaply made games, that sell millions?

They ignore alot of story telling, graphics, mocap, voice acting, ect ect compared to others.
Just focused on fun cartoony art style characters, and fun gameplay loop (at the cost of everything else).

Their IP, and that they create massively selling titles with a lower development budget. They have series that can sell 15-30m without needing to throw $100-200m at it.

Ironically as the longest running platform holder they are also the one that would have the least problems being succesful if they no longer had a platform.

If we compare Nintendo to say Sega they always had much better profit margins, and the ability to build a big cash reserve, that meant they had much more longterm security to handle different challenges like the Wii U failure, while Sega basically got very close to bankruptcy from failures such as the dreamcast.

Games and the way they keep innovating their core franchises to remain fresh and relevant. Then keep them console exclusive.

They dominated handheld market. Otherwise the sales of Nintendo 64, GameCube and Wii U could be fatal and force them to become Third Party Publishers like Sega.

This is a pure handheld in every sense of the word. It's designed primarily as a mobile device that is played in your hands.
And there is literally nothing wrong with that.


Thus far there hasn't been any real logical rebuttal against the Switch being a pure handheld other than "Nintendo Marketing says otherwise".
...Because Marketing. The bastion of truth, logic and facts.

And that is as far as this discussion will likely go if you don't have anything tangible.