I think people are mistaking 3DS not having DS' astronomical sales, for 3DS selling badly. 3DS has on average, been selling over 100k per week. Some weeks, like the most recently tracked, it was well over 300k. A system selling over 50 million units worldwide, is not anything even remotely close to approaching "bad".

The fact of the matter is, DS and Wii both (and even PS3 and 360 for that matter) had massive boosts in console sales numbers because of the "casual" gamer phenomenon. Many of those people have simply moved on to what is conceivably cheaper and easier to access "casual" fare: that being shitty little games they can get on their phones and tablets, that have very little actual commitment to them, either in time or money.

I do not think that if Nintendo released another straight up portable, meaning that even if "NX" did NOT wind up being a "Fusion" device concept, I think it would sell well, and over time at least sell 3DS-like numbers, which is GOOD. DS type sales are probably not going to happen again. And if anyone wants to try and point back to Game Boy sales....well there are a couple of elements to that. For one, they released many different versions of the Game Boy over a longer period of time, and for another, GB had it's own "casual" type phenomenon in Tetris. Tetris in the late 80s and early 90s was a SUPER big deal, even to people who weren't traditionally "gamers", and many adults bought a Game Boy just because it came packed with Tetris. That was a genius move on Nintendo's part. And later, the Game Boy Pocket model got a massive boost from the Pokemon phenomenon that swept the planet. So two major gaming fads really helped boost those sales. As you saw, Game Boy Color and Advance models, while STILL selling quite well, the numbers started coming back down to Earth. It wasn't until the "casual" craze popped up with DS that number skyrocketed once more.

And the point ultimately is, that people were fools to ever expect that 3DS and Wii U would sell anything close to DS and Wii numbers. Granted, the Wii U has under-performed by any measure. But the 3DS has been a success for Nintendo, as all their portables (minus the Virtual Boy experiment) have been. And if the "NX" is a two-in-one type deal, doubling as a home console and portable, well.....that is going to skew how people view it's numbers. But as I said, even if it were JUST a portable, with no home element at all, it would likely continue to sell 3DS like numbers.

Yes, since there will be no competetion anymore.

Another thing that people seem to forget is that a huge selling point of PSP was that it was by far the best portable multimedia device for its time, u could play games, watch movies, listen to music, browse the Internet which is something that no other portable device could do well until smartphones started to become popular.

I agree with a lot of what u wrote except for saying that GBC/GBA sales were returning down to earth because that's untrue, Gameboy was generally shipping sub-10 million units in the early-mid 90s , its peak sales were actually in 1999/2000 and GBA shipped over 15 million units in each of its first 4 full fiscal years.

Nintendo will never lose in a handheld battle.
Mobiles are not handhelds.
The end.

Handhelds will last longer than home consoles IMO. Smart devices are simply uncapable of beating them for games, whereas home consoles are slowly losing all their space to PCs, and MS themselves might ditch consoles for Windows HTPCs(maybe keeping the xbox name), which will probably beat Sony if they go on traditional console route.

I can't see Nintendo losing next generation and probably not the one after that either, but my answer is definately no.

I kind of agree with this tbh, I think NX if the speculation is true could be a turning point for consoles because as far as handhelds go the will always be a market for them even smart devices can't negate that because they're a lite alternative at best for portables and the vast majority of owners aren't dedicated gamers it's equivalent to during the PS2 era when people were saying Facebook games could take over.

Consoles however have the issue of where good PCs for gaming are not only becoming much more affordable but they're essentially a better alternative platform to a console, in long run that's an issue, consoles became huge because of their differences to PCs and ended up on a path trying to emulate them in the long haul will have to become unique again.

Smart devices are also getting too many games for it's own good. Not many companies want to risk making high budget games and have it sitting at page 2483 of Play Store, played less than bejeweled's 922827262th copy. As long as companies would rather making high profile games for dedicated handhelds, there will be a market for them.

No, it's never safe to say that about anything. We never know how the world will change. Maybe they will totally disappear. Maybe Nintendo will dissapear. There are a lot of factors which are impossible to know.

Yes, because handhelds will die sooner or later and it's very hard to get or compete in the market. I don't think any new competitors will appear, and even Sony may quit after Vita. If Nintendo is the only one, they just can't lose. And the handheld situation is very unlikely to get better.