legendarylemur posted... It's not that simple. Their home consoles outside the Wii haven't sold gangbusters but they had higher margins, except like the Wii U which they kinda sold at some loss for a bit IIRC.
Comparatively their handhelds always sell like crazy, but they're inherently cheaper both hardware and software wise in their MSRP, even though the cost of production isn't even that much lower. The 3DS was sold at a loss for a bit during their price cut arc. $170 by today's standard is like pretty damn cheap for a console that comes with 2 screens and one of them runs double resolution due to 3D. Just because the graphics aren't as powerful doesn't mean it's like phenomenally cheaper
Switch on the other hand was only briefly sold at a loss during the chip shortage era but had insane return on each units. They're still selling well and is one of the highest selling consoles of all time, so you mix that together, and you might even find that Nintendo realized handhelds have been holding them back this whole time. Since the Wii, their infrared and other motion techs have also gotten much cheaper and less specialized, but also the Joy Cons are like $80
Handheld is specifically a loss for the consumers. They were very affordable, and their dev time never took that long and had very consistent stream of quality releases. Also their games always relied on gameplay more than flashy graphics to distract the players. Handheld aficionados can attest to this, that the only thing a handheld was truly deficient in was being able to travel in larger worlds (technically Xenoblade 1 worked but... it's by far the worst version of that game on the 3DS), but they generally just had much funner games for cheaper and for far less waiting time, but it also cost the companies developing them very little aside from creative manpower.
So you argue the opposite to the above users, it's actually the handheld that was holding them back and thus merged away, not the console division?