10M vs 100M

Guess we are not in the same situation.

If The Legend of Zelda was a 10M + selling series I'd see an issue, but it isn't. The core audience that wants a LoZ game more than likely have a Wii U, and the remaining fans are waiting for it to release ot buy one. 

The 3D Mario team at EAD Tokyo shipped a game 6 months ago. The Animal Crossing team is currently working on both a 3DS game and a Wii U game. Retro is most likely working on NX but they just shipped a game 16 months ago; having a new game ready by the end of 2016 (under 3 year dev time) would be a stretch. Mario Kart team just finished working on Mario Kart DLC within the past 6 months.

They have a few studios who could conceivably have a new game ready for launch at the end of 2016 and early 2017, but not much. You know what's more likely? They ship a mere handful of 3DS / Wii U games at that time, and have multiple games ready for launch and launch window in 2017-2018. Otherwise they will have the same drought problem they had early on with Wii U.

Just look at the games Nintendo published for Wii in 2011. Compare that list to the games they're publishing for Wii U in 2015. Do they look similar? Nintendo is notorious for having almost no new releases on their platforms for the last year or two of their life, and for obvious reasons -- their developers are too busy making games for the successor to make games for their currect platforms. But most of their developers have only just started making NX games if they have started yet at all, which means there will hardly be any games ready before 2018.

The 2016 Pokemon game will be on 3DS, as well as Pokken Fighters on Wii U. GameFreak has a history of not fully supporting Nintendo's consoles at launch.

Yeah, they're reusing assets. They have to because they're pushing games out so quickly. Did they make low-effort games like Captain Toad and TriForce Heroes so that they could work on other games at the same time, or so that they could finish those games extremely quickly? *shrug* Maybe both. Captain Toad was made in just a year though, surely it took a decent amount of attention to push it out that quickly.

You're being pretty generous to suggest that all of these teams could make a full game in under three years. You saw the trouble Nintendo had with Wii U games. You also forget that EAD 4 is hard at work on Mario Maker and EAD 5 is fully committed to Star Fox and Miyamoto's pet projects. Sure they're working with Platinum. Again, is it so that they can finish this game in an unreasonably short time or is it because they're simultaneously working on games for another system entirely?

As I mentioned before, why haven't we heard any rumblings about this system from third parties? The Wii U cat was already out of the bag by the time Nintendo officially unveiled it at E3 2011. Yet there isn't a whisper about their next system. Jokes aside about Nintendo not even bothering to send dev kits to third parties this time, somebody ought to have spilled the beans by now.

All of this is also assuming NX is either a home console or the mythical fusion machine. What if it's not? What if they also have a separate handheld on the way? How does that fit into this?

Anything is possible but my gut says they aren't ready for a 2016 launch.

UUUM but one thing, Revolution aka Wii already had been revealed : (from wikipedia) ''It succeeded the Nintendo GameCube, and early models are fully backward-compatible with all GameCube games and most accessories. Nintendo first spoke of the console at the 2004 E3 press conference and later unveiled it at the 2005 E3. Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata revealed a prototype of the controller at the September 2005 Tokyo Game Show.[24] At E3 2006, the console won the first of several awards. By December 8, 2006, it had completed its launch in the four key markets'' : it's the same with NX, they talked about it in 2015's e3, they will reveal it next e3, and then they will release in the next year, THE NX WONT COME OUT IN 2016 PLEEEEEEEEEEASE F UNDERSTAND

Yeah, I was starting to feel more and more that Zelda U being cross platform could be a thing, but as long as it`s still on Wii U everyone should be good with that.

Nah, the pattern holds just fine. Pokemon isn't a typical annualized series. Very rarely are games actually released under 13 months apart. Ruby & Sapphire released November 2002, FRLG not until January 2004, 14 months later, then Emerald a short 8 months after that. They made it a good 15 months with no new releases between BW and B2W2. I wouldn't even put it past GameFreak to have pushed Z / X2Y2 back a bit so they could make a big deal about the 20th anniversary.

You said, "The only in-house team left that is working on a big Wii U or 3DS game is the Zelda team." But that's not true, because Mario Maker and Star Fox are big Wii U games. Fire Emblem Fates is a big 3DS game that IS only just finished making, and they are now likely working on the promised "third version" DLC. (You may argue that Fates reuses a lot of Awakening assets, but there are significant improvements to the assets in question and a full cast of new characters, maps, weapons, etc. It's a fully new game. Er, two fully new games? A fully new game and a half, how about that.)

Oh yeah, Iwata also said they'll be releasing five mobile games within the next two years; all of them are being made internally, one of them helmed by the Mario Kart producer. That's more development resources tied up in smaller projects.

It's all speculation. In order to believe both systems are coming in 2016, I have to accept a lot of assumptions about those systems, about Nintendo's internal development processes, and more. I have to assume that people just don't feel like leaking any information about these systems at all including what kind of controller they have, what kind of components they use, what kind of games are in development. I won't commit to all of those assumptions so I'm content to be extremely skeptical.

None of their Wii U games have pushed notable amounts of hardware. All of the games they've released so far have combined to push a barely notable amount of Wii U hardware. Since 2012 EAD 4 has been making New Super Luigi U, Pikmin 3, and Mario Maker. Mario Maker is undoubtedly a "bigger" game than those other two in every sense. Likewise, since 2011 EAD 5 has only released Wii Fit U and Steel Diver: Sub Wars, and both of those were co-developed with external teams. Frankly, considering their history I'm not surprised they're struggling to turn those two projects into anything more than tech demos. I don't see how they could have a fourth game in the works at the same time.

As for EAD 4, they could be making another Pikmin. I wouldn't be surprised to see it come in 2016. But it makes as much sense to expect it to be a swan song for the Wii U as it makes to expect it to be an NX launch title.

a zelda game on two systems? it'll never happen. #gamecubemasterrace

My thought was handheld in Holiday 2016 or spring 2017, then console for Holiday 2017.

I think I disagree about Mario Maker being a hardware mover on a stronger console, but we'll never know either way. And that's the problem, you are using the phrase "big games" to refer to games with high hardware pushing potential, with no way to know with certainty which games those are. So you get to be the one who defines what that means. When what a big game should be is a game that uses a large amount of the development resources available to a studio, especially in the context of studios being able to make multiple games simultaneously.

You initially claimed that most of Nintendo's internal teams would be able to have games ready for release in 2016 and 2017, but now you say EAD 4 and 5 aren't important. We already established that EAD 3 is working on Wii U (barring the possibility of a Zelda port to NX, which depends on how demanding development of one version of the game is). EAD 2 just shipped a Wii U game and has a 3DS game and a Wii U game releasing later this year, so I don't agree that they can have a new game ready to ship in under 2 years. Mario Kart 8 took 2.5 years to make, they spent another six months to a year after that making the DLC, and the series producer is tasked with overseeing the development of 5 mobile games by March 2017. So I think they're out until 2018. Nintendo's internal teams are tied up. It just doesn't add up to a 2016 launch to me.

I think next year we'll continue to see games made as quickly as possible with reused assets. The brunt of 2017 will be empty.