Why is the Nintendo Switch Lite such a big deal? Because Nintendo's handheld consoles are actually the company's biggest sellers, and the Switch Lite is an incredible replacement for the sunsetting Nintendo 3DS line.

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Every Nintendo home console ever made — with one exception, the Nintendo Wii — has sold fewer units than every portable console Nintendo has made. Every single one, from the original Game Boy (118 million units) to the Nintendo 3DS (75 million sold and still going) has an absurdly high sales number attached to it.

Nintendo's DS sold nearly 155 million units, making it Nintendo's highest-selling game console of all time (Sony's PlayStation 2 is still the reigning king of game console sales, at over 158 million units sold).

By comparison, the extremely popular PlayStation 4 is around 100 million units sold after nearly six years of availability. The same can be said for the Nintendo Wii, which has lifetime sales over just over 101 million units.

All of that context is crucial to have before learning that Nintendo's most recent handheld, the 3DS, is currently being sunset. No major games are on the way, and its annual sales number has fallen off a cliff.

The Switch Lite is intended to pick up where the 3DS sales left off.

As Wedbush put it in a note this week, "Past iterations of Nintendo handheld hardware have routinely topped 25 million units in annual sales, and we think that the console quality of Nintendo software, coupled with a price point under $200 has the potential to drive sales significantly higher than we have modeled."

In so many words, this less expensive, portable-only version of the Switch is much more than just a cheaper iteration of the Switch: It's the latest entry in Nintendo's incredibly lucrative handheld gaming business.