It's a possibility but pivoting to software isn't easy by any stretch, and it wasn't something Sega should have even been able to do (financially.) The only reason it happened is because Sega's biggest debtor, Isao Okawa, forgave that debt on his deathbed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/17/business/isao-okawa-74-ch...
In a slightly altered timeline where Okawa didn't do this, Sega would have went under and its IP's would have been sold piecemeal to the highest bidders.
"It eventually became one of the most prominent figures in today's video game industry, being the world's largest video game company by revenue"
i.e. on the verge of bankruptcy according to ^
And there you have a key difference between Microsoft and Nintendo.
As a Nintendo baby, it'd be a dark day if some conglomerate bought them.
I was just thinking though, if they needed money they could easily raise crazy amounts of cash from their fanbase via crowdfunding.
It's frustrating because there's a lot of untapped potential.
They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax.
I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I don't think that's ever been the case.
Edit- The people downvoting me have apparently already forgotten about the Wii U. Imagine if they had two such systems in a row, without the DS/3DS line as a profitable fallback. Such are the possibilities of the future.
When Nintendo's doing well, they're doing great, and everyone seems to forget the bad times. The GameCube era wasn't much better, but at least the GameCube and GBA were profitable/break even from their launches, as opposed to the Wii U and especially 3DS post-Ambassador price cut.
Would be interested in a discussion or any kind of rebuttal from others who are actually familiar with Nintendo's financial history.
To be clear: Nintendo as a company operated a loss from 2012-2015. An incompetent CEO could easily exacerbate that into a death spiral. Don't take Nintendo for granted, is all I'm saying.