They definitely did lose money on the WiiU, it wasn’t selling…. you can’t gain profit on something that doesn’t sell…
Never mind the fact that Iwata willingly took a 50% pay cut because the console was doing so poorly…
They only had a loss in the first quarter of the launch year, after that they were always in the black. Iwata took the pay cut because it performed abysmally compared to expected sales, but it still had plenty of sales once they dropped the price a bit reworked their ads.
They sold 13.56 million consoles total, absolutely making a profit both from the console itself and then all the sales of surrounding software and accessories. But do keep in mind they wanted to sell more than 50m at the very least, which is why it was a failure in their eyes, and the eyes of everyone else.
PC has already "won" in the sense that it has access to all of the content from all of the platforms out of the box, including native games dating back to the DOS days. In the sense of a more simplified/living room experience, however, it's true the console space is never going to have a clear winner-take-all scenario. If one of the big three does eventually bow out, I imagine they would be replaced by a new player sooner or later. Hopefully it isn't Facebook or some shit lmao.
The problem, for most gamers, is that PC doesn't offer a convenient and easy way to experience any of the content that isn't on Steam or a similar digital store. The native DOS support is terrible and can't handle many of the hardware differences between machines from back then and today. Many early 3D titles from the '95 also just don't work right. Emulation has many graphical and audio errors that will annoy people, plus most often the interface and setup procedures are a mess.
PC gaming is the project car of the video game scene, it's cool when it works but you better enjoy tinkering the moment your "project" is more complex than slapping on new tires and changing the oil.
Windows 11 is already an attempt to make it easier to use for normies, particularly when compared to how easy android or iOS are compared to windows 10, but it's still a long way until it actually becomes as easy to understand and use as modern consoles.
Regular people just want their emails, browsers, YouTube, and games in a single box at home. And Microsoft is finally starting to cater to that majority more.
I just hope that in the future they don't fuck things up for power users, but I would also certainly appreciate if more old PC games were as simple to set up properly on windows as it is to hook up an old console again.