The 3DS didn't start great but it sold 75 million units over its lifespan, which is more than the N64, SNES, or NES

Your right the 3DS did great when looking at sheer numbers but when it "only" sold half of its predecessor I have a feeling that this helped Nintendo to end the handheld line.

At some point I need to write a blog post about how weird console numbers are when it comes to deciding what fails and what succeeds because you're a 100% correct the 3DS did great but because it sold less then the last gen it was a "failure".

Handhelds, almost as a rule, outsell home consoles. Mostly because they're per-person rather than per-household, and also because they break and get replaced.

The explosion of smartphone gaming was probably the biggest contributor to canning the 3DS.

> I have a feeling that this helped Nintendo to end the handheld line.

I think you might want to reevaluate this position seeing as their current console and multimillion seller is handheld. It CAN dock, but even then there's a no-dock model, the Lite, which is handheld only.

Anything that enables homebrew on those systems probably circumvents "effective" copy protection under the DMCA and would thus be illegal to use or traffic in.

I doubt it; the ability to run your own code is completely different from the ability to copy somebody else's code

As far as I can tell homebrew enabling is legal, which is why Nintendo hasn't C&Ded the sites permitting it, and instead kept patching out jailbreaks.

People have been hacking their devices to run homebrew since the NES.

Cope.

No good open source tools for the 3DS just yet. However, it's possible to make homebrew with Unity and the official SDK, however, it's nothing you can distribute legitimately, and the tools are hard to find due to Nintendo taking them down

Nintendo really is their own worst enemy here. Fans love their stuff and want to continue to enjoying with it long after Nintendo has abandoned their hardware and their customers, but Nintendo would rather bite the hand that feeds it than tolerate the enthusiasm. A better company would embrace it and release some of their own tools and software for fans to play with instead of threatening lawsuits.

I can't imagine putting a bunch of time and work into a project that will likely be DMCA'd to death.

Nintendo is a capitalist corporation aiming to maximizing profit, and not anything else. Maximizing profit is the true end of Nintendo, and that may be done by several strategies. Maximizing the consumer well-being (i.e. being ''nice'') generally is what we hope they do, but it is not necessarily the most able to profit = profitable thing to make. Nintendo perhaps actually thinks it is horrible that random people will spoil their IP or threaten their sales:

- Spoil their IP → making mods of their games can spoil Mario, Pokémon etc as the child-friendly characters they are, not to mention water down the novelty of a new game, if for instance there would be a ''new'' 2D Mario or pokémon every 6 months (if they released the tools and did not persecute). Or even being straight better received than the official games, which is already the case with several pokémon fans going after hacked ROMs because they hate the current generation's gameplay etc.

- Threaten Sales (main one)→ If fans and the community extend the life of older hardware and games, then the people will consume less new games and even less switches, and it directly replaces their current cloud retro gaming offerings (it is so barebones that anyone could make a better experience of NES SNES etc by just installing an emulator and downloading ROMS, make that automated and Nintendo-aproved retro gaming is over).

Nintendo therefore has a hostile draconian, anti-fans anti community anti ecological and even anti consumer strategy to maximize sales. The fact that there is still people working on stuff on this environment is only due to the strong love the fandom has. I wish they could dedicate this craft to FOSS games, where their contribution would be respected and celebrated.