I think you must be blind to everything that's happened with Nintendo these last 8 years since the Wii fell off a cliff and they followed with Wii U. Like I said, if Nintendo go out of their way to get devs to make games, those devs (unless they are money hatted) need some really good feeling about whether they think it'll be a success. Up until now Nintendo has shown that it's unlikely.
Nintendo's position is just a continuation of their trend since they first releases the NES (Wii bump notwithstanding). The Wii U is the bottom of the graph. Whether it's the bottom of a trough or will continue waits to be seen, but that don't think for a second that publishers and developers would not be very wary about Nintendo hardware.
OK, so let me walk this through logically then, based on all your commentary thus far.
Let's say for the sake of argument that this idea of a glass ceiling on 3rd-party games being substantially low that has been thrown about since the GameCube era has unquestionable merit to it, that there is a downward trend in sales of 3rd-party games that is both unquestionable and impossible to ignore and, as evidenced by how long it has been talked about, not even close to a new phenomenon.
So then... what was it about the
Wii U that, up until launch, made all of that data irrelevant? What made 3rd-parties go "y'know, Nintendo might be on to something, this hardware will totally beat back the decline in 3rd-party software interest"? What made them think they were safe to greenlight any 3rd-party software for launch, and in some cases
exclusive software that only sells on Nintendo hardware which has a history of not selling 3rd-party software? Clearly, there was a course correction that happened rather rapidly after the launch of the hardware, but if this idea that they'll sell sub-50K units of software on Nintendo consoles has unquestionable merit, why were they even considering games on a Nintendo console in the first place?
This is without even factoring the handheld market into things, which I have left out of the discussion in fairness to your argument and does sell 3rd-party software more than adequately.
Until those questions are properly answered, it leads me to believe that 3rd-parties aren't as invested in this idea as forum-goers are, that there's more to Nintendo's relationships with 3rd-parties that any of us will ever be privy to, that the issues with 3rd-party software are perhaps, maybe, just a TAD more nuanced than most people are willing to admit, considering we're still using a talking point against them that existed 15 years ago, when the industry was an entirely different animal than it is today.
Nintendo can change, 3rd-parties definitely have already, and yet we're still stuck discussing Nintendo like we're still in the middle of the GameCube era. You'll forgive me if I think that there's something not quite right with that.
I thought it was a misconception that Nintendo generally sells its hardware for profit at launch, and that it just was often able to sell its consoles at an initial, albeit small loss so that it can break even and sell it a profit sooner rather than later compared to what Sony and Microsoft have historically done.
This is correct, they aim for break-even historically and aren't averse to small hardware losses. And Wii U has shown that they are begrudgingly willing to take a deeper loss if required.
There's also their particular design philosophy to use as many parts as they can that will see a rapid cost decline, which is how we saw a $99 GameCube, because it was engineered to be cheaper to make at a faster rate.
And that worked out just swell for them.
Had they sold more hardware and more software with it at launch, it very well could have balanced out. And even the losses they took on Wii U and 3DS weren't so large that it buried them the way it did for Microsoft and Sony.
You know all this talk about ram and bandwidth is going to be irreverent if Nintendo only talks about how cool it is to take your NX games anywhere on the go.
FTFY
