Where I grew up in the early 1990s with Nintendo, I can say that Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon style simulation games have made me keep buying their products. I work in social media marketing; and I worked for
DeNA, who was working with Nintendo-- before moving onto another game company.
Nintendo does a lot of things correctly; but is very fierce about their intellectual property and on a business level, very defensive about their products when criticized-- which makes them difficult to work with. This is the same with development companies making games for their systems.
While they pride themselves on ingenuity and 'creative consoles' that think 'outside of the box', they often forget that thinking too far outside of the box makes companies unable to work with their limitatations. Their previous consoles had hardware restrictions that made it impossible to run game engines such as unity or frostbyte; both game engines that are commonly used by standard HD compatible consoles. To make a game for Nintendo, developers were forced to recode their entire game on a system that couldn't render the graphics properly and controllers that were dependent on gyroscoping. This is essentially similar to a developer coding a game for early Playstation, but told to run it on a 1980's Atari. It can't work; thus we have what happened to the Wii-U and why we saw very few games produced, ultimately failing in the market.
Rather then let the consumers tell
Nintendo what they want in a console, and Nintendo delivering their demand-- Nintendo makes their
own system the way that they want it, and
tell people to buy it. This isn't always the best course to take, and we saw that with the Wii and Wii-U as stock in Nintendo dropped significantly with shareholders. It dropped 7% at the reveal of the Nintendo Switch to the press, as well. They're struggling to stand up in the console war and their hardware, while 'innovative', is not up to the technological advances of its competition. This means developers will work with companies such as Sony or Microsoft because they have less restriction, can use higher quality game engines, and less scrutiny and censorship.
I love my Nintendo 3DS; they will always lead the way in handheld gaming-- Pokemon, Animal Crossing, etc. These franchises paved the way to a royal road for them. However, they took a hit financially for their refusal to 'play the industry game' and make their own rules. As a result, in 2014
Iwata cut his own salary just to make up for the lost revenue.
They need to make internal changes; Mario is great, Zelda is great, but the company needs to understand that if it wants to make any profit, it can't run by the beat of its own drum and refuse to comply with the demand of the industry standard. It's 2017. I love them, but they need a serious
wake up call.