I know it's important to compare apples to apples (*snrk*) in general and you guys think you're making a good point when you bring this up, but cutting out Nintendo's hardware actually obfuscates the point that this comparison is intended to raise.
If you wanted to
compare Apple and Nintendo to one another, you're right: you would have to compare overall revenues of both companies. That's because both Apple and Nintendo build their business around vertical integration of their software and hardware (although their actual pricing models are very different; Apple is
way more hardware-tilted.)
That's not what we're trying to do here at all, though. Instead, we're trying to determine if Nintendo would be better off as a third-party of Apple than they are as a first-party. What we can establish with a quick examination of the issue:
- Nintendo can't easily go in just a little bit on such a move. The nature of their vertical integration means that their exclusive software is what drives hardware sales (as you can see from all the people saying "man I wish Nintendo games were on iOS, then I wouldn't need to buy Nintendo hardware for them.") Breaking from this pattern would cause devaluation of their hardware way out of proportion to how much actual development they did for another platform. (Apple had to learn this lesson the hard way when they listened to similar "analysts" and let people sell their software on other companies' computers.)
- Nintendo could expect to be a very successful developer overall on a platform like iOS, but there's still a limit to how successful that could be. Nintendo certainly isn't going to generate sales equal to the entirety of existing App Store revenue. In likelihood, they're not going to swallow up even, say, 1/6th of it; the market's the size it is and there's lots of entrenched competition in the space already.
- Nintendo's ability to position and market their products, to increase the scope of their products, and to keep their products selling over time would all be significantly reduced operating in someone else's sandbox than they are now.
With all that stuff on the table, making the financial case for Nintendo to move into iOS support just isn't possible,
even though iOS can be a very lucrative platform for many other developers with different needs -- it's talking about throwing away a historically profitable business for a
chance at success in a business that, at very best, would provide far lower revenues than they're earning now. The only time this could ever make sense is in a situation where Nintendo's own hardware is beyond the slightest hope of salvating and literally every other dedicated gaming hardware company was abandoning the industry as well; we're not anywhere close to such a situation today.
But this sabotages your own point. People don't buy smartphones to serve as phones, because phone service is basically irrelevant; they buy them as portable 3G internet/app devices. The pull of the existing ecosystems on iOS and Android is so strong that even powerful brands like Blackberry and Windows Phone can't get any traction in today's smartphone market -- it literally doesn't matter how good these devices are because they aren't tapped into the ecosystems that fuel the market leaders.
If Sony or Nintendo made their own phone platform... it's not going to have Instagram, or Read It Later, or a wealth of Twitter clients, or any of the other stuff that people actually use on their phones. Its ability to move the needle on the mobile phone market will be basically zero, and none of the people like SmokyDave who are excited to play games on their phone will trade in their current phones for these ones just because they've added phone support.