Third party support. It's been a consistent issue regarding games systems released by Nintendo. While the company has its award-winning first party group to supply games for its various consoles, It's not always a guarantee that other game publishers will back their systems. It's been an issue that existed since the Nintendo 64, and one that Nintendo has attempted to resolve with its future systems, to varied degrees of success.
The Nintendo DS was one such success. While the system was made popular with innovative non-gamer titles such as Nintendogs and Brain Age, many hardcore gamers remember the DS for its excellent third party support. Many DS fans would argue, third parties outdid Nintendo's offerings on the system. With many big Japanese publishers putting out fan-favorite games and series such as Ace Attorney, The World Ends With You, Final Fantasy, and Western companies such as EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and WB bringing big franchises like Call of Duty, Skate, and Assassin's Creed, along with innovative oddities like Scribblenauts and Might and Magic.
So with the DS' successor, Nintendo 3DS being in development, it naturally got the attention of developers. The DS was only the second best selling gaming system ever made at 150 million units sold, and with more power and a stereo 3D display, developers could bring over games that couldn't have run on the original system. So when Nintendo first revealed the console at E3 2010, Nintendo took the time to spotlight all the games and franchises that would join the games from Nintendo's own software divisions such as Kid Icarus: Uprising and Nintendogs + Cats.
Some pretty big names were shown such as DJ Hero, Dead or Alive, Saints Row, Resident Evil, Assasin's Creed, Batman, Kingdom Hearts, and Metal Gear Solid. The 3DS was shaping up to be better than the DS in every single way... And then the system released.
The 3DS launch was notorious for being mediocre. The best game at launch Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition, a game people already played on consoles. And once sales of the system became sluggish in the summer, developers became antsy. As such, many of those promised projects from third parties slowly began being cancelled. In fact of that lineup, only about half of it came to fruition. And who knows how many other projects planned that were cancelled.
The 3DS' storefront, the Nintendo eShop, wasn't even ready to go at launch. We needed to wait until the June system update to download Virtual Console and digital games from it. As for the eShop itself, Nintendo learned quite a few lessons from WiiWare and strengthened its good points like allowing for self publishing, while removing most of its limitations such as its file size restrictions. Indie devs put out a few stand outs in the systems' early days, but like the rest of the 3DS' third party support, it'd eventually start to become limited, as the system's lack of power and engine support compared to other, more powerful consoles and mobile phones, meant it missed out on many of the big indie hits during the 8th generation.
Even once Nintendo started turning the system around and managed to get some must have titles out, third parties still were skeptical about it. Throughout its life, the 3DS was always that system that third parties just saw as... kind of there. While the DS got a wide range of titles from innovative artsy games, to miniturized versions of big console franchises at the time, most developers eventually just saw the 3DS as the system to throw together some quick and cheap RPGs, and maybe an occasional platformer. Nintendo knew this was a problem, and so 2012-2013 revolved around a strategy to distract 3DS owners from the system's middling third party support. Pump out big first party releases in rapid fire succession, and promote the shit out of the bigger third party releases such as Monster Hunter and Shin Megami Tensei IV. It certainly worked, the 3DS had what was perhaps their most aggressive first party support yet, but third party was rather underwhelming compared to its predecessor.
At the very least, it wasn't the Wii U, a console that the vast majority of the development community avoided like the plague after the first year or so. I'd say it was moreso on par with the GameCube and Wii's third party lineup. It's not... great, but it's got some solid stuff if you're willing to dig. And on the plus side, it fared better than the PlayStation Vita, which suffered from both poor third AND first party support.
TL;DR - The Nintendo 3DS was a fantastic system. But it was really more of a Nintendo first party and JRPG box than many fans remember or are willing to admit it to be. While it had some stand outs like Resident Evil Revelations and Tekken 3D. Third party support was generally pretty lackluster compared to the breadth of variety the DS saw.
