Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
"Ceases to matter" to who? The Wii-U sold poorly, so I'd argue there's not that many people willing to buy a console for Nintendo exclusives. And I see nothing in the Switch that makes it obviously better at attracting third party developers than the Wii-U was. So if you're prepared to drop £280 for half a dozen Nintendo games, that's great, but that's not been a particularly successful formula for many years.
As I understand it though, Nintendo always make a reasonable profit on their hardware, so at over 13 million units sold the Wii-U didn't do great numbers but it will have still put a decent wedge of cash into the bank for them (if the previous assertion is correct), and then there were some 92 million units of software shifted, many of which will have been first party Nintendo titles. (Do other companies still pay royalties to publish on other consoles? I honestly don't know.)
Add in peripherals, Virtual Shop sales and whatever else, and it's entirely possible that Nintendo did quite well commercially out of the Wii-U as a whole, despite it being, in the grand scheme of things, a poor seller.
As Lewie has already noted, as a company they're not exactly short of cash so they're clearly doing something right overall.
All that said I'm as dubious about the Switch as everyone else, the Wii-U was pretty weird with its screen-on-a-gamepad configuration which no one really seemed to know what to do with, but the Switch takes it a whole new level of oddness.
That said, if after 6 months or a year there are a handful of real must-have titles for it that can't be played on anything else, I'll get one. I still don't regret my Wii-U purchase and despite only playing six or seven games on it in anger, it delivered some magical gaming experiences, and appealed to me in a way that the PS4 and XBone utterly and completely failed to do, and still do now.