I don't see Nintendo fading after just this generation. They've got significant reserves of cash, the Wii's still selling strong, and even with the rise of phon

I don't see Nintendo fading after just this generation. They've got significant reserves of cash, the Wii's still selling strong, and even with the rise of phones and tablets, they still have a massive chunk of the portable market. It's always been their strategy to take risks, even if that causes the occasional Virtual Boy. Sega also made a series of big hardware blunders before they bowed out - the Game Gear (not a disaster, but hardily the Game Boy-killing Holy Grail they needed), squeezing life out of the Mega Drive with the Mega CD and the 32X, the various design and marketing blunders that scuppered the Saturn, and then the failure of the Dreamcast (which wasn't actually a bad device, it just had the misfortune of going up against the PS2).