In 2016-2017 right before its successor.

We'll get good first party support for it for another 2 years (through Holiday 2016). 2017 might be kinda barren as I imagine they'll be preparing to release the successor at the end of the year. But it would be nice if we got more last year support than for the Wii, that's for sure. Considering they won't be caught up in first time HD development like they were for Wii U, it's possible they could support the system more at the end than they did with Wii. We got 2 great games out of the N64 the year GCN was released with Paper Mario and Conker's Bad Fur Day.

Another 2 to 3 years probably. Proper software releases might even end as soon as the end of next year.

Three more years untill the sucessor releases.

I personally see a full 24 months of proper and dedicated support for the console. After that I can envision Nintendo drumming up promotion and hype for the next console and moving most of their primary developers over to working on that. Nintento are notorious for ditching their consoles software support when sales are lukewarm. The N64's first party software line up was almost barren by 2000 only 3-4(European and Japanese respectively) years after it came out and the GCN was released in September 2001. Support for the GCN was even shorter I recall. This is a drastic contrast compared to Sony who released Gran Turismo 6 late 2013 on PS3 months after the PS4 was released. GT6 is a big budget game which had several hundred developers working on it. I still remember the disappointment I felt when Nintendo had noticeably withdrawn their support of the N64. The Dreamcast had come out and the graphics absolutely blew the N64 out of the water, the PS2 was looming with a freight train of hype(DVD playback, backwards compatible, 600 trillion polygons per second(yeh right...) with rumors of Microsoft entering the console business.. Can't really blame them. Same deal wit the GCN but sales were worse and the PS2 had almost a monopoly on the market...

2 possibilities.

1st possibility: The WiiU have a "normal" successor. It's announced in 2016 and released in 2017.

2nd Possibility: The Nintendo Fusion is real, it's the successor of both the 3DS and the WiiU, it will be announced at the end of 2015/early 2016 and be released by the end of 2016.

Anyway, the QOL will probably be released in 2015, and we'll see how it will change things.

Always remember that the Nintendo DS WAS the successor to the GBA, Nintendo told otherwise because they wanted to keep the Game Boy brand in case the DS wasn't a success.

2015 will be the key year to say for certain, but as it stands they need to be aiming for a mid to late 2016 release. Promotion for the next console begins during the first half of 2016.

I actually think that would be a mistake: having a console with a death sentence for more than a year is a big mistake as it kill its sales while people wait for the next one.

No, they should announce and release it the same year.

Its going to last at least 2-3 more years.

prob 3 more years but it's successor could be out in 2. If it's under 10M sold for it's first 3 Xmas' then I can't see it hitting 20M sold lifetime.