Doom me if old.
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/07/31/exactly-how-bad-is-the-nintendo-situation
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/07/31/exactly-how-bad-is-the-nintendo-situation
The short answer, for now, is no. Nintendo isnt about to go bust. It still posted a profit, thanks to its assets and investments and favourable changes in the currency market. The Wii U is costing money, which means that Nintendo is making an operating loss when it comes to actually selling games and consoles, but its a very, very long way from bankrupting the firm. The 3DS, meanwhile, is a big success - its not matching the insane sales that the original DS was generating, but then the original DS didnt have smartphones to compete with.
Even the Nintendo consoles that arent regarded as particularly successful - the Gamecube and the N64 - have always made Nintendo money. This is, lets remember, a company that has only posted one year-end loss in its entire history, in 2012. This is one of the reasons that Nintendos future isnt in jeopardy: the company is extraordinarily solvent. Its got warehouses full of cash. Seriously, take a look at Nintendos assets: it has 492,334,000,000 yen in cash. Thats $5,038,214,927.30. More than 5 billion dollars. In cash. And almost that much in short-term investment securities, which are essentially bonds.
Its too early to write the Wii U off as a failure already, but even if things dont pick up and the console does end up a flop, Nintendo could weather it. It could weather several such failures. Other companies - Microsofts 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 peoples 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 didnt 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 Nintendos operations it actually doesnt matter as much as you might expect. Thats reflected in Nintendos share price, which took a 6% hit in the past week but is actually 37% up on this time last year.