We're on two different planes, here.Alcibiades said:and all of these facts have little to do with a possibility of Nintendo going 3rd party anytime soon.
The article in question is detailing why Nintendo is in fact number one in hardware sales. The author goes out on a limb to chide people who claim that Nintendo is not number one, when clearly those people are referring to the console market exclusively. My point is that everybody knows that if you include the freaking Game Boy Nintendo sells the most units, and that that is completely irrelevant to what people mean when they say Nintendo is doing poorly.
So the article is a crusade to get the mainstream press to add the qualifier "But remember, Nintendo, despite sluggish sales of their GameCube console, rapidly-dwindling third-party support and alarmingly few games on the horizon, is still number one if you add in Game Boy sales"? Yes, that's what I thought, and yes, it's ridiculous.You are not talking about Sega, but some mainstream press will compare, and the target here was battling mainstream perception. "Badly performing Gamecube" compared to NES/SNES/N64 would not be inaccurate, but the mainstream press rarely stops there.
BTW, while it is true that Nintendo isn't lagging too far behind the Xbox, that's a statement requiring some qualifiers; the GC is officially $50 cheaper, and unofficially even cheaper than that with all the system+game giveaways that I see stores doing all the time.