>>58855374the major benefit is that nintendo has whales as diehard fans and they wouldn't need a very large market share in order to benefit from the endeavor. Plus, they already had tons of experience with hardware and software manufacturing, including operating system design as well, so they only needed to net maybe 1% of the market in order to profit off of it enough to make it worthwhile. Remember that a brand with a similar walled-garden appeal-to-whales ethos, Apple, only makes up about 20% of the smartphone market. And they have an even smaller grip on the OS market, at roughly 5.5%. Nintendo getting just an inch of that would be very lucrative for them.
Of course I'm sure there are things I'm not considering, including the actual risk of investment itself, but I still believe it would have been feasible at the very least.
