I’d imagine that Nintendo could probably score some cash on their back catalog (at least if they got their heads out of the stone age on online services/sales, people aren’t going to pay enough for Super Mario Brothers to be worth stamping it into cartridges and selling them brick and mortar); but this would both require getting their act together (purchasers of Nintendo’s back-catalog downloads on the Wii have an endless stream of horror stories about the total mess that is the interaction of Nintendo’s incompetent DRM system with the tendency of console hardware to not last forever); but they’d likely have a trickier time as time went on.
Selling the back catalog is relatively hard to screw up (though they still arguably manage) because much of it is a sunk cost and the rest is bundling copyright-blessed ROMs with already available emulators; but new development faces the trickier hurdle of paying off the dev costs (and dealing with the somewhat fragmented world of dev environments and walled-garden tithes.
Plus, Nintendo has frequently taken advantage of being able to do ‘wacky hardware choice + first party game that does something clever with that hardware(or in catridge-based mobile systems, sometimes even weirdo hardware built into the cartridge. What was that game with a UV sensor?)’. If Nintendo goes software-only, now they have to come up with ‘Mario Respin N+1’ that manages to be compelling and lowest-common-denominatored across multiple consoles, maybe iPads, and all their various control schemes and limitations. Suddenly, things get hairy.
What I find strange about Nintendo (though, in my layman’s opinion, reversing this could be very convenient for them) is how they seem to have a knack for economical design in mobile consoles; but have absolutely hit the rocks in terms of going all-proprietary, all the time, on in-home consoles and not even getting much in the way of savings for it.
This generation, both MS and Sony threw in the towel and got AMD to spin almost-entirely-a-PC for them, abandoning Microsoft’s departure from this model with the 360, and Sony’s history of truly weird consoles stretching all the way back to the PS1. Nintendo? Total oddball. PPC-based multi-chip-module (3 vendors in one package, apparently quite the integration delight), totally awesome resistive touchscreen quasi-tablet right as everybody and their mother is buying a tablet, and the thing is still having issues with full ports of 360 and PS3 titles…
Given their ‘absolute speed not a priority, innovative peripherals, etc.’ style, Nintendo would seem like a natural candidate to take advantage of the brutally competitive world of mobile-driven (but easily 1080p capable, especially if you relax the thermal headroom a bit and give them some additional RAM and die space) world of commodity ARM SoCs. Seems like going down that road would be an easy way to get a cheap, powerful, hardware base (that will support whatever curious ideas they feel like playing with this generation), while avoiding the death spiral effect of having to maintain a 100% proprietary console, and still undercutting the x86-based consoles.
