It’s too early to write the Wii U off as a failure already, but even if things don’t pick up and the console does end up a flop, Nintendo could weather it. It could weather several such failures. Other companies - Microsoft’s Xbox division and Sony Computer Entertainment among them - have operated at huge losses for years on end, but Nintendo has never done business that way.
This is why, if you ask me, there is no chance that Nintendo will exit the hardware market. Certainly not in the medium-term future, and possibly not ever. Why would Nintendo release its games, its major selling point, on other people’s platforms when it can continue to have total control over its own? Of those 11 million 3DS games sold in the last 3 months, most of them were Nintendo-published, and Nintendo didn’t have to pay a penny to any other platform holder.
Nintendo can afford to own its own platforms for a long time yet. The Wii U is really, really struggling, but in the grand scheme of Nintendo’s operations it actually doesn’t matter as much as you might expect. That’s reflected in Nintendo’s share price, which took a 6% hit in the past week but is actually 37% up on this time last year.
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