Isn't that their normal cycle though? Produce a console that prints money, produce a console that bleeds money, repeat. Seems like their cash reserves keep them nimble enough to experiment and remain independent.
I don't think bleeding money is accurate for Nintendo. They are in the habitat of iterating on their previous consoles instead of just throwing everything out the window each time like some other companies, so even with their consoles that flopped it's not like the R&D money is just down the drain, and I'm sure labor-and-materials-wise they're making some kind of margin on the hardware itself.
i don’t think they’ve had a console that bleeds money in the sense that playstations/xboxes have, though they’ve had quite a few flops over the past 20 years
Their only flop in the past 20 years was the Wii U. (The Gamecube is now over 20 years old.)
Previous poster was probably assuming, like I did, that the Virtual Boy was less than 20 years ago…