Right, and Nintendo is now in a world where their hardware gaming platforms will never even remotely reach the scale of distribution they can get from the iPhon

Right, and Nintendo is now in a world where their hardware gaming platforms will never even remotely reach the scale of distribution they can get from the iPhone all by itself. A lot has changed in the last decade. A billion global consumers now have powerful computers in their pockets, and no Nintendo games run on them. Nintendo isn't wildly profitable, and has rarely ever been so. They'd be far better off distributing their extremely valuable IP across a billion consumers via other vendor hardware. Put good Mario and Zelda games on the iPhone, and make a billion dollars tomorrow. Let Microsoft / Sony / and Valve fight it out in consoles, and release a Mario game for the XBox that sells 10 million copies. It's a radically more profitable approach than trying to stay in the hardware business when gaming platforms are plentiful via smart phones and tablets.