But would they be more profitable? Pokemon X/Y's market price in retail ~$35 right now. Pokemon X/Y sold 4M units over the course of their first weekend [1]. And that's not counting console sales related to X/Y.
I imagine 2DS holiday sales are going be pretty healthy because of Pokemon X/Y by parents who bought into the FUD about the 3D in the 3DSes turning their kids' brains into mush.
My niece, who has access to both Android and iOS tablets is getting a 3DS just for Animal Crossing. If the software is compelling -- and one can make the argument that it is -- people will continue to support Nintendo.
1: http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/15/4840738/pokemon-x-y-sales
They might be immensely more profitable and they would be good to remake mobile games a little more fun. Super Smash Brothers would sell alot and with very smart in-apps or f2p like Halfbrick style would probably dwarf Angry Birds, many of Nintendo titles would. They are just not reaching tons of fans and sales.
Nintendo sells 4M units because that is a small set of good games on a small market like console 10-20million users (across all three bigs it is only 150 million). Mobile is billions of users, pretty much everyone would buy Nintendo games on mobile, they could also change premium pricing and sell easily at 5-10-15 even 20 maybe. In-apps would keep them alive in profitability and they could change mobile gaming in big ways even down to controller accessories.
They are already exclusive and this wouldn't change their business model much but it might mean less hardware from Nintendo, they haven't really been the best at hardware even though I loved the original NES that was better hardware.
I am positive developers would love this because developing for the Wii and Nintendo hardware nowadays means developing for a very small target, weak hardware and limits what can be done. Makes modern day ports a nightmare and we live in a multi-platform world for most games, starting with mobile (the new handheld) now.
Nintendo has made the best of that but kids all play tablets now. If they want to reach the kids they'll have to do something like this soon so they don't skip a large part of this generation. They were everywhere in the 90s, and a spike again with the Wii before mobile but their hardware just isn't as attractive now with all purpose devices like tablets and minis.
They are rolling on some nostalgia fumes still, but the Wii U might be a sign of things to come. Of course you could also say they didn't differentiate the Wii U enough, most people don't even know it is a new device, they think it is an add-on to the Wii. Horrible branding. They should have called it the Nintendo Revolution as is brought in their first tablet like device. (Nintendo Revolution was the code name for Wii during early dev).