Nintendo's never been on the verge of bankruptcy. That's a ridiculous myth that's always tossed around by news sites to get more clicks. Nintendo is a surprisingly tiny company with billions in cash in the bank.
As others have mentioned, they don't have backup cash cows like the other conglomerates so their short-term profits do vary wildly depending on the success of each platform, but the premise of one generation being a matter of life or death is a false.
> Nintendo is a surprisingly tiny company with billions in cash in the bank.
I never realised this, so I went and checked.
Nintendo has (per wikipedia) only 5k employees, compared to MS and SONY which both have more than 100k (across all divisions clearly).
As others have mentioned, they don't have backup cash cows like the other conglomerates so their short-term profits do vary wildly depending on the success of each platform, but the premise of one generation being a matter of life or death is a false.