What will happen to Nintendo if the Switch is another “failure,” as in, it ultimately sells around what the Wii U sold, that forgotten console no one knew existed. It’s hard to know what the cut-off would be for a “disappointment,” but Gamecube and the Wii U are viewed as rather poor-selling, at 21 million and 13 million respectively, while the N64, SNES and NES all fared much better at 33 million, 49 million and 62 million respectively. Anything under 20 million would be considered bad, but there’s an additional dimension here that is rarely talked about. If the Switch fails, it fails hard, because it has no new handheld system to prop it up. As such, its metric for what’s considered a success is almost certainly going to have to be higher than normal.Last generation, even though the Wii U struggled with low sales, Nintendo at least had a piece of hardware that was selling five times as well, the 3DS, which sold about 65 million units.This is where there’s a lot of pressure not just for the Switch to drastically outperform the Wii U, but to sell enough units so that Nintendo can realize their secret-but-probably-not-that-secret plan to make the Switch both its home console and handheld, merging those divisions together at last.There’s another question on everyone’s mind if the Switch doesn’t do well. Would another Wii U-like generation be enough to push Nintendo out of hardware entirely? I mean, Nintendo hasn't exactly adapted well over the years and they are still developing the same old games with new titles over them. Besides the original Wii, there has been no innovation from Nintendo in years. Don't say the Switch is, because it isn't. It's just jumbling everything together as one.Sales are off to a strong start, but they need to break the threshold and combine sales of the console and handhelds to be successful.If not, we really could see a future of no Nintendo hardware and possibly selling just games to other willing payers. As you can note, Nintendo has cornered themselves into a market where only they develop games for themselves... and thats a dangerous market to be in.