I remember caring about Nintendo's third party support. It was mostly centered around the N64, say 1996 to 2001, give or take a few years.
In the SNES era, many third parties dumped Nintendo because they wanted to get away from Nintendo's shit, and Nintendo didn't have 95% marketshare to lean on anymore. In the N64 era, Nintendo's shit got huge. As the GameCube started up, I fell for the lie that Nintendo had learned their lesson and they were trying to do better, but eventually you have to admit that Nintendo fucks things up for their own selfish ends, and it's ridiculous to blame third parties for not falling on their swords to keep up the illusion that Nintendo cares about you. Nintendo is not owed anyone's support, they have to earn it, but they've built a lifetime of doing the opposite.
The PSX was a damn fine console, and it deserved to become a third party darling and spank the N64. The PS2 was also a damn fine console. The GameCube was a halfhearted attempt, at best. The original XBox tried harder than GameCube-era Nintendo did. Wii had it's unique appeal
, but the industry had moved on to HD. Nintendo's "not enough people have HD to make it worthwhile" rang false to anyone with an HDTV. The Wii U was a tacky gimmick that nobody wanted, not even Nintendo's first party studios, as justification for "we really learned our lesson this time" Nintendo to try and win the industry again on the back of another last-gen console.
And Nintendo fucks up because they
can fuck up. They know that they're sitting on one of the finest videogame studios in the world. That means they can play it safe. It means they can win without trying, and trying is risky/less profitable. Nintendo vs The Entire Videogame Industry isn't a problem with The Entire Videogame Industry, it's squarely a problem with Nintendo.
Give up on the dream of a third party friendly Nintendo. No amount of willing it with your mind can make Nintendo make all the right moves to make that happen. Use history as an indication, it's not going to happen, even if Nintendo says it is. They've said that before, time and time again. Brace yourself for an NX that has
even worse third party support than Wii U did (it can always get worse, and there were plenty of people who believed in Nintendo's Wii U third party strategy, and got burned). Rely on the things you know you can expect, which are Nintendo's first party games. Expect more exclusive partnerships which blur the line between a moneyhatted third party game and an outsourced first party game (Nintendo seems to want to gather enough exclusives to become an island unto themselves). Expect a style of games that caters to the market that eats up Nintendo's first party games and rejects third party games.