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If recent history is any guide, though, the 3DS will only enjoy a few more years of active support from Nintendo before being fully phased out.

To see how the 3DS' future might play out, we delved into Nintendo's annual financial reports to see how hardware and software shipments fared for recent Nintendo portables after their successors hit the market. We also looked at the number of unique titles released for those systems before and after a new Nintendo portable was released (we focused on releases in the Americas to avoid issues with double counting titles ported to multiple regions).

Using those numbers, we projected the percentage of sales and software releases we could expect Nintendo to see for the remainder of the 3DS' life (by taking the midpoints of the GBA and DS' post-successor lifecycle percentages). This projection has a lot of wiggle room depending on whether the 3DS is more like the GBA (which had a modest long tail after the DS was released) or more like the DS (which declined to zero rather quickly after the 3DS was released).

Further Reading Game Boy Micro

You can quickly visualize the results in the charts above. To summarize, though, the 3DS' best days are likely behind it now that the Switch is around to attract consumer and corporate attention. Nintendo only tends to support two portable systems simultaneously for a year or two at a time. After that, the old hardware declines to a virtual rounding error in Nintendo's numbers as the new hardware continues its ascent in sales.

The particulars differ a bit by generation. The Game Boy Advance was at or near the peak of its hardware and software sales when the Nintendo DS horned in on its space. The Nintendo DS, meanwhile, had already seen its sales performance in decline for a year or two by the time the 3DS hit the market. In both cases, though, the new system seemed to accelerate the death of the old in the marketplace, understandably.

Can the 3DS buck the trend?

The 3DS is at a bit of an inflection point right now, though. Despite seeing fewer and fewer distinct games released annually, 3DS hardware and software sales ticked up slightly in the last fiscal year (which ended in March). That's odd for Nintendo systems, which tend to continue declining steadily after hitting a peak in sales performance (though GBA hardware sales did tick down slightly from fiscal '01 to '02, before peaking in fiscal '03).

The 3DS' recent success could be a sign of more sustained, ongoing interest in the system. Or it could be a momentary, Pokemon Go-driven blip before the Switch quickly overwhelms the market. We'd lean toward the latter, but we won't know for sure until it happens.

Maybe this generational change will be different. Maybe consumers will treat the Switch more as a home console than a portable and continue to see the 3DS as a necessary companion with its own unique features going for it. Maybe the lower price and hardware redesign will convince more people to invest in the 3DS' aging hardware en masse for a few more years (remember, though, that the Game Boy Micro and the Nintendo DSi XL didn't do much to halt the decline of their old hardware platforms).

We tend to doubt it, though. By this time next year, the Switch will very likely represent more business for Nintendo than the 3DS. By two years from now, the 3DS will be bargain-basement hardware that sells mainly to extremely budget-conscious shoppers. A year after that, the Switch will likely be the only current piece of hardware Nintendo is officially supporting.

Listing image by Kyle Orland