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Nintendo won't be going anywhere for a long time. They've got massive financial reserves.

Not this generation.

At launch, it was losing money

A year later it was still losing money.

Only in 2014 did they stop losing money.

They sold 2/3 of the consoles before they stopped losing money. Therefore, the console lost money over it's lifetime (before you count game sales).

They're terrified of their brand ever being associated with "adult" material because parents might sue them for said exposing their child to hypothetical adult material.

That must be why Nintendo partnered with Playboy to promote the Nintendo exclusive release of Bayonetta 2.

http://wiiudaily.com/2014/10/nintendo-partners-with-playboy-to-promote-bayonetta-2/
http://bayonetta2.nintendo.com/
http://www.playboy.com/galleries/pamela-horton-nintendo-bayonetta/slide-1

Considering it's a console that plugs into a TV, I don't think this matters much at all. Valve's definitely been throwing their weight around demanding better performance and fewer bugs, though.

That or the fact that of the four eighth-generation consoles available now, all three run AMD graphics. PS4 and Xbox One have essentially the same AMD APU, and Wii U is reportedly built on a Radeon HD 5000. Only the OUYA console has NVIDIA graphics, and that's the same Tegra 3 that's in the first-generation Nexus 7. Perhaps this is NV's attempt to redeem itself to gamers who say OUYA doesn't count.

I agree with everything that you have to say except the part about the Wii Gamepad Pro. Either you are referring to the Wii Classic Controller (Pro) or the Wii U Pro Controller.

The issue with both of these is that games have to support them in order for you to use them. The same can be said of touch screens where if the software doesn't allow some other form of control then you are going to end up with gorilla arm.

This site claims its a 4-core 3GHz Power7 CPU with x4 hyperthreading, plus AMD GPU. I'm having a hard time figuring out how that's a "horrible, slow" CPU unless they have a lot of code that is optimized for x86.

Nor does it do anything about the control problems, if not making them a bit worse since a Circle Pad Pro hasn't been announced for the XL.

This, right here, is what tells me Nintendo hasn't gotten it for a while. You have more room, why not add the second Circle Pad? We already have a few6 games that do use it, and many more that would probably take advantage if it was there. They were fairly aware back in 2006-2008 and did a lot of good moves with the Wii (and some bad ones). Now, six years later and the dominant force in both home consoles and handhelds, they have the chance to not only progress but also fix any previous mistakes. And what do they do?

The N64 2. They've gone back to the ego-centric and closed-mindedness that led to the N64 from the SNES and will suffer exactly the same for it. Don't believe me?

• They ignore format upgrades
  With SNES->N64, it was not going from cartridge to CDs.[1] For Wii->U, it's ignoring the now-huge HDTV market. Wii U games run in 720p, including their much-hyped NSMBWU2BBQ. While not as dire as the cartridge mishap, it still shows that they don't understand the high-end consumer, which is the one that is far more likely to have a higher attach rate[2]
• They ignore storage capacity
  Once again about the whole cartridge/CD decision, except this time it's about internal storage. The Wii U will only have 8 GBs internal storage. Supposedly they'll support external hard drives in some fashion, but they could still really hurt themselves as they try to expand their downloadable market (and heaven help us if a developer wants to install files to it to help a game run faster.)
• The name
  I don't know that the N64 ever got a lot of flack for its name, but it was extremely generic. Using "Wii U" as the successor to "Wii", which already had plenty of jokes to go with the name (though those were quickly shut down by sales numbers) has only led to a lot of confusion; Jimmy Fallon thought it was a new controller for the Wii during Reggie's recent late-night visit, and the day of Nintendo's E3 conference a prominent newspaper (I want to say USA TODAY) also referenced the Wii U as merely an extension of the Wii, though I can't find the article and they likely updated it to correct that bit of mis-info.

  For someone like me, it just makes me think of more shovelware, bad online presence, and a focus on things like "Wii Play" instead of, I dunno, getting something like Xenoblade Chronicles to the states in less than two years after it's Japanese release (and nearly a year after the EU/AUS release!).

And there are plenty of brand-new screw ups, like still using those horrible friend codes in some capacity. I don't care if they're "Simplified", they need to die completely. Even the hardware looks generic, doing away with the sleek and minimalist design that a lot of people liked about the Wii. I could go on and on, like how the controller looks like crap (after they gave us the Gamecube controller, which I still believe is the best controller design of any console thus far).

The decisions behind the Wii U and 3DS XL (and their E3 conference, which investors apparently didn't care for, either) just show me that Nintendo has once again lost its way, and we've got a good two generations before they realize this and do something understandable again. What makes this worse is that even while their consoles were floundering, Nintendo's handhelds were still going strong and every iteration made huge strides (such as from the original GBA to the GBA SP and pretty much every change to the original DS hardware). Now that no longer seems the case. The Nintendo fanboy within me weeps in a corner as I start eying the