Nintendo NX Devkits are out

[A Black Falcon]

Hmm, you think it's going to be more of a 3DS successor than Wii U? That would be interesting; the 3DS is older than the Wii U, but it's been much more successful and doesn't have any real competition right now, so I don't know if it really needs a followup so soon, particularly when the New 3DS just released, like, this year. Meanwhile the Wii U has struggled badly, and things won't get much better anytime soon, not with so few games being released for the thing and most of this holidays' major titles pushed back to next year sometime. I know the Wii U will only be 3 years old this holiday, and about 3 by the time the NX presumably releases next year, but it's in much worse shape so I'd think Nintendo's focus would go there. There are some big negatives about releasing mid-generation and getting into that trend would probably not be great, but what choice does Nintendo have? The Wii U won't get anywhere near the GC's level of sales. But we'll see, you could be right that it'll be a more handheld-focused system, or another "third pillar" idea as you say, or something like that.

As for carts... that'd make sense or a handheld of course, but on a console prices for large memory sizes are just too high for that to be a reasonable option when compared to discs, I think. Handheld games aren't as big as console games need to be. Suggesting it as you do is a good idea, but I can't quite see it working at the sizes console games are now. Hopefully it's possible someday though, discs are annoying because of how fragile they are, and the mechanical drives often have issues too.

Oh, and of course I really hope you're right about Nintendo going for a digital-only approach; physical media is important, and we lose things in digital only... most importantly rights, preservation, used sales, and such. As consoles get more and more digital-focused, game preservation (will you be able to play this game in 20 years?), consumer rights, and used games become more and more restricted things. DLC and digital-only console games are awful on a preservation standpoint! Of course game publishers don't care about this and just want you to keep buying their new stuff, so someone will surely push it at some point, but it's bad for some good reasons. At least on PC it's much easier to preserve things digitally, but on consoles, with all of their restrictions, that is much more difficult.