Topic: Nintendo firmly believes theres a future for handhelds

If we didn't already know this about Nintendo, we probably wouldn't be buying a Switch. Being portable and kind of wanting the producer of said portable to believe in its future. 3DS now only exists to keep third parties rolling as they can still produce cheap to develop games and sell to a large audience.

Once upon a time the life of a system depended on how long stores were willing to give it shelf space. Now with the rise in digital distribution that is no longer true. The PS Vita disappeared from most stores by the end of 2015 and yet the system still gets regular software releases and there are games planned until at least early 2018.

I fully expect that full-priced 3DS games will start to dry up by the end of 2018. Nintendo wants to keep the system going so that there will be a market for games like Dragon Quest XI, Yo-Kai Watch 3 and the Snack World next year. After holiday 2018 I would be surprised if there were any more big releases on 3DS. However, the hardware will stay in production (at lower levels) until at least 2020 so that Nintendo can continue to milk the value out of their back catalog and sell hardware to people who break or lose theirs. There will also be a steady flow of cheaper downloadable games for a while after 2018.

@Pupito
I think the gamepad was a nice idea but poorly implemented. Especially by nintendo. I must say I never really liked it. It made the whole expensive. What is worse, out of reasonable fear the batteries will die I bought two gamepad batteries this week, probably some of the last ones available. How many games do I own that actually force me to use the gamepad? Not too many! Still I bought two spare batteries for my three gamepads 😕

@Firelork
Depends how sales will go. Right now its a huge install base and games are probably less expensive to produce compared to the switch

I'm rather torn on this. On one hand, Nintendo essentially said the same thing about the GBA when the DS came, and that ended up replacing it entirely. I don't believe that Nintendo are going to drop support for 3DS immediately or any time soon, but with more and more devs now turning away from 3DS and looking to the Switch, it's going to happen sooner or later. I'll give it about two to three years tops before the 3DS finally slows down, and it's already happening.

But I also love the 3DS. It is easily one of the most enjoyable platforms I've had for the longest time now and has certainly seen a lot of use from me. I wouldn't want them to declare it finished quite yet. There's still a few games left that I would love to see localized — Yo-Kai Watch 3 in particular. So I'm definitely hoping we'll see some of those.