So Nintendo should be afraid of offending a small minority of the videogame market while a much larger majority thinks their current product is a joke and wants nothing to do with it? And what brand power will Nintendo have after multiple years of scraping by with like four games a year on some obscure console that practically no one owns? My thinking is that is that Nintendo needs to put a failure behind them ASAP or risk cultural irrelevance, which would completely destroy any chance of any future Nintendo console getting anywhere.
What brand power does Nintendo have now that they can't support the Wii U? I put them at Microsoft pre-xbox level in the market. Which means they would have to run a similar playbook (which we all know they won't) to break back into relevance. Releasing a new system would fix at best one issue (power) and that's not going to bring back third parties.
1. They would have to spend a ton of money on IT. COD, Battlefield, almost all FPS shooters need a great online infrastructure that Nintendo can't support today. FPS are dominant in the market so you need to have them.
2. Spend mad money hats for third party exclusives. The Gamecube had almost all 3rd party ports for a couple of years. Going for ports isn't going to make you relevant. You need to pony up to have 3-4 Titanfal like exclusives at launch in addition to 3-4 solid Nintendo exclusives.
3. You need to be willing to lose $ on hardware. A year from now the PS4 is probably going to be $350 and have a one or two of the launch titles packed in. You are releasing midstream against a console that could be PS2 levels of success. You need to come with more power at most at the same price.
4. You need to spend $ like mad on marketing. Remember Microsoft's $500M marketing for the Xbox? Nintendo has an image problem and it's only going to go away by showing people why they need to come back to Nintendo and what they are missing.
This all leads to Nintendo being willing to come back to a bloodbath financially. They won't do those things. Odds are they will try to make Wii U profitable and try to come up with another gimmick to be a success to replace the Wii U. That's why I personally think that the QoL is actually the Wii U replacement. We've yet to see the gimmick though.
Nintendo did ditch the Virtual Boy quite quickly and that didn't affect anything. They replaced the DSi within less than two years and got away with it. The Game Boy Color came out in Nov 1998 and was replaced by the GBA in June 2001. That's less than three years and, again, no one cared. Those GBC owners were all over the GBA and unlike the Wii U the GBC was a very successful product. Release a Wii U successor in Nov 2015 and that's a three year life cycle, same as the GBC. Realistically I don't think they could get something out quicker. And I would obviously suggest they support the Wii U up until its replacement. With the Dreamcast, Sega was effectively gone for over a year and they had been losing money up to the point, while Nintendo has savings.
It's hard to draw parallels to the handheld market. Leaving Nintendo there really means you aren't interested in handheld gaming. The V-boy was an epic-ally bigger bomb than the Wii U and I didn't see the others as new consoles but as existing consoles with cheaply added features. Like the DSi, didn't that launch with no exclusive software? You basically know you were buying a DS. And the price gap was little and you were getting a bigger screen so it wasn't all a loss.
You know what the Dreamcast had? Great third party support. In the 3 years it existed it had like 622 games. And now that my retro-collecting is getting around to the Dreamcast alot of them were great. And most of the crossover games were best on the Dreamcast. And it is powerful, it looks great through VGA on my HDTV very much comparable to PS2 power which came later. Sega would be an interesting case study. They had other business markets that were doing poorly contributing to their poor financial position. They also did retarded things like build a $100M game (Shenmue) for the Dreamcast. I guess what I'm trying to say is their failings weren't the same as Nintendo and I'm not sure they are comparable at all.
Weren't you that said no one has come back from a home console failure? This isn't going to be easy and I'm not sure what the answer is.