Topic: Moving on to the Next-Gen 3DS System

@Pokefanmum82 Having one platform was the entire purpose of the development of the Switch. Iwata explicitly said it was (for NX). Nintendo never actually WANTED to have to support two platforms. No company has been terribly successful in doing so. Technology just mandated, until now, that mobile devices are too lacking to keep up with anything else so they had little choice. But they had a conundrum. DS was introduced less for consumers, more for developers, as a viable platform for low cost development for experimental games which would then interest consumers. 3DS carried on that tradition but added the requisite graphics upgrade. An iteration on 3DS would again require an iterative graphics upgrade, and that crosses a line that it no longer offers truly lower cost development than "last gen" console graphics. Which brings us right in line with Switch. Nintendo doesn't make much money on hardware, they make their money on games. Hardware is just a delivery system for the games. So it's better, cheaper, and ultimately more effective (and fun!) to have a single platform on which they can push a high volume of games and reach all their customers at once rather than having to maintain different dev teams and two separate libraries simultaneously. And for us consumers, we only have to buy games for one platform instead of two.

Whatever "smaller, more pocketable" hardware they inevitably come out with, there's very little chance it won't be running Switch hardware, and access the Switch eShop, and accept Switch Gamecards. It would be a "Switch family" product the same way the weird shaped 2DS is a "3DS family" product. Which would be fantastic! The only thing better than Switch itself is a massive library of Switch games we could play on a variety of hardware devices of different shapes and sizes.

And if we needed further confirmation, Pokemon mainline coming to Switch kind of confirms it beyond all doubt.

I'm not sure why people say long term 3DS support means Switch isn't its successor, as though long term PS3 support meant PS4 wasn't its successor, and long term NES support meant SNES wasn't its successor. Nobody kills a console dead the day they launch a new one. You still support the existing customers and ecosystem while feasible. WiiU was a special case, they "killed it" but it had really already been dead for over a year on its own.

It's not just the NVidia pricing, Sony did the same with the PSTV and Apple does the same with the Apple TV. But I get what you're saying about the value of portability. I'm in the same boat for the most part. Well except for the "nothing to do with price" bit. I think price does matter.

If a Switch minus dock was only $20-40AU cheaper than one with it? I'd get the one with the dock every time. I might care more about the portable mode but having it also on the TV is worth that much extra. But if it was the other way around? If it was a significantly cheaper console and/or had vastly more storage but at the cost of not being portable? I might not be that interested but I think there would be a market for it.