While thinking about Nintendo's new approach that they've said they will be taking, i.e. the unified OS and architecture, I've been thinking of a new way in which Nintendo could approach their games each generation. The next Nintendo consoles should be the place to get Nintendo content.That seems obvious, but what I mean is that it could be more of a service in a sense. Take Mario kart as an example. You get one of those per nintendo console. What if they supported that title troughout the generation? What I'm proposing is that Nintendo would look at each of their major console titles like zelda, 3d mario, metroid, pikmin (I know it's not really major, but they could do a lot woth the franchise) as a service of sorts. That is, you buy zelda and throughout a course of 4 or 5 years you get major updates and expansions to that zelda game. Or Mario kart, instead of Nintendo releasing it and then having to wait another 5 years, you could rely on Nintendo to bring new content to it every few months with new tracks, characters, and modes. This is kind of like the mmo model in a sense. With mmos you pay for an expansion and throughout that expansion's lifetime you get major content updates as well.
As far as how development might work, here's what I think. Nintendo would have their larger teams work on the main games and then once the main game is completed a smaller team would work on providing updates and new content for it. This would leave the rest of the teams available to work on something else.
The pricing on this could be based around a service based model or pay individually for the things you want.
