Sorry Michael, but I can't help feel that you've entirely misdiagnosed Nintendo's losses this year. Nintendo are still profitable on Wii hardware and software; heavily so, in fact. I very highly doubt that your mooted Wii HD, putting aside the practicalities of such a thing (it's a nice concept, but I can't really see a way it could be developed and sold), would have attracted much of a larger user base at all; consoles have ALWAYS been sold on the strength of software, as the 3DS has rather bluntly shown, and simply "adding HD" would have done not a damn thing. Nintendo's losses are mainly down to two big factors- the 3DS price cut (remind me about your prediction for that one again?
) and the Yen. Nintendo is extremely far from being the only one affected by the Yen; take almost every other large Japanese multinational by way of comparison. Couple this to smaller yet significant expenses like R&D and the new headquarters Nintendo's pumping cash into, and it seems to me that the lack of a HD console is pretty damn far from being Nintendo's primary source of losses.
I also think you're completely premature in calling WiiU a lost cause, too. As it stands, we know very little about this console; we know no software, nor it's graphical capabilities, nor anything of it's online network beyond the most basic of fundamentals. You're absolutely correct to state that the WiiU doesn't look like it'll succeed on the market, but you're wrong to state that it looks dead, because... well, it doesn't look like anything. Declaring it a preemptive failure neglects any console defining software; like declaring Wii a failure before Wii Sports was announced. I can understand your difficulties here; you're an analysist with very little to analyse. However, declaring it doomed to fail because we don't know the price, while ignoring the myriad other issues in play which we simply don't have an answer for, strikes me as somewhat
premature.
