Apple and Nintendo have some of the strongest brand loyalty this side of macrobrewed beer and sports teams. They can afford to go against the current because they have extremely deep barrels of fanatics who will buy just about anything they make, regardless of whether it's cutting edge or not.
Nintendo in particular also has a different culture than the modern explosive shareholder mentality. They have a huge war chest can likely operate at a loss for over a decade, even if their stock crashed to zero tomorrow.
In other words: they have cultural skin in the game. A bad quarter or even year won't have them seeking out private equity funding.
Didn't they almost go broke after the Wii U? I vaguely remember that the Switch was do-or-die for them.
Yep, and it wasn't the first time the company nearly went bankrupt before miraculously recovering.
Yes, and the Wii U would have been 4-5 years of disappointing sales. But they still tried to invest hard into their hardware and software.
In comparison. How do we think Activision or Ubisoft would have reacted to those kinds of shortcomings?
That’s a pretty spectacular way to miss the point.
The implication that these “fanatics” are misguided because they fail to prioritize “cutting edge” over every other purchase criteria tells me you haven’t been around the block enough to realize that cutting edge is not a positive product attribute. Believe me, I have storage bins full of obsolete cutting edge products that I got less joy from than many boring old appliances I use every day.