GameCube and the WiiU?
Nintendo owns its survival on handhelds. Pokémon prints money since 1996.
Nintendo owns its survival on handhelds. Pokémon prints money since 1996.
Wii U was probably profitable. Not a success like a company like Nintendo needs, a strategic misstep that didn't impact their fortunes significantly. Hardware-wise it was a very direct descendant of the Wii (and gamecube). Relatively low development cost. The games developed for it are being ported to the switch to great success.
The Wii itself was still a G3 PPC chip, just add a few hundred Mhz
It also had more RAM (which allowed the "Twiizers" attack over a decade ago)
All the Wii-centric functionality (USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, SD card, etc) was abstracted away inside an ARM co-processor inside the GPU. Named "Starlet" by the homebrew community
Wii software was then written that would simply poke at the API's it exposed to add that functionality
It might be possible for Creatures Inc and Game Freak to have The Pokemon Company create a Pokemon game for PlayStation (it's not known how ownership/control is divided), but it couldn't use the name Pokemon, the Pokemon logo, or any of the existing Pokemon characters.
And regardless of who owns Pokemon, Nintendo is the one selling Game Boys and DSes to play it on.
It's a complicated arrangement, but they're definitely banking off the success of the franchise directly and indirectly.