| mirgro said: So that's what my answer was to the DSi, absolutely no. But back to my quesiton, if space was the problem, why doesnt the XL have a GBA slot again? |
Honestly? Because 99% of DS owners just don't give a crap about GBA games. DS replaced GBA in 2004, six years ago. GBA games are no longer made nor supported, so Nintendo and 3rd party developers can no longer make any money off the system or its games. Why would they support a system and its games when those are no longer profitable to them, and which the majority of consumers likely doesn't even know exists anymore? At some point, they just have to let it go.
Besides, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of games available for DS, and that's more than enough for consumers. The extremely tiny majority of hardcore gamers who still care about and play GBA games will have a GBA or DS/DS Lite to do so anyway, and Nintendo will not waste millions upon millions of Dollars (I'll come to that in a minute) to maybe please a tiny and shrinking minority.
Also, and probably the single most important point is, you have to understand Nintendo is a business. And not just any business, a BIG business. DS is at what, 120 or 130 MILLION sold right now? Let me paint you a picture: Let's say producing and implementing a GBA slot into a DS systems costs $10 (just pulled that out of nowhere, could be any amount). Now let's say Nintendo sells 10 million of those systems (a very small amount, for a system as popular as DS), WITHOUT this GBA slot...
They just made 100 million Dollars.
See what I'm getting at? Nintendo, as a company, will do anything they need to to cut costs, while still striving to offer as best a quality product as possible. Especially in the console/handheld business, and especially in Nintendo's case, when selling tens of millions of systems, even the slightest of small reductions in cost can yield mind-bogglingly immense amounts of money.
Of course, space-wise, they could have included a GBA slot, easily. But they chose not to, because it has become irrelevant. When the DS first launched, it had a GBA slot because nobody knew if DS would be a success, and GBA was still very much alive and kicking. It was a back-up, that also allowed users of the new system to play a large amount of games on it, when the system's own library was still very limited. These days, DS is the new king in town, in fact it's Nintendo's (and soon to be videogaming's) most successful product ever, while GBA and its games have simply faded away.
Nintendo Network ID: Cheebee 3DS Code: 2320 - 6113 - 9046
