Nintendo may be unpredictable, but that's only in the sense of what they say things are meant to be. History has some interesting proof.
Remember, the concept taken wrong is that kids don't care about specs.
It's not that the kids care or not about the numbers and processing power, they likely won't know anything about it.
What they DO care though, is the latest Call of Duty game. That's one of the main games that kids usually play.
What happens when Call of Duty gets made?
Where do you think the devs will make this game if they want to impress? 3DS / WiiU? or PS4 Pro and XBOX Scorpio?
(I have personally had to explain what my WiiU was to some kids who were already gamers)
The consoles that existed at the same time as the SNES that were more powerful... how affordable were those?
Devs didn't even get a chance to develop for those, because the SNES (which was more powerful than the Genesis) already had the cooler games anyway... and there was the PS1 which btw, which came out in 1994 / 1995. It was affordable (much more than those others that were competing with SNES), it was next gen. (Though the PS1 was meant to be Nintendo too, but this is another long story)
Sonic# wrote:
If you want to argue that "they're very unpredictable," then that undercuts the logic of what you're saying, since then there's no ground for your prediction. One other scenario against the secret: it's entirely possible that they will release the Switch and then in the next year look at purchasing data to decide whether to run down the 3DS. That doesn't mean that they were "replacing the 3DS in secret" (which implies that a decision has already been made but it's a secret one), but that they evaluated the current market post-release and made a choice (which suggests that there is no secret decision, but it may be something they'll evaluate on their 1, 2, or 5-year plan).
You're giving the "secret" more importance than the actual way things will go XD
It doesn't matter if it's a secret or not, or if the decision has been made or not. It could very well be the natural course of evolution.
That would happen, though, if they learned their lesson about the WiiU.
I just recently heard the Switch won't come with Virtual Console at launch at least. This is something I wouldn't have predicted, and is something that shows their decision making is strange at best. I do have another theory: Someone who hates Nintendo is changing them from the inside. (Sabotaging them). Before you argue about sabotage or not... XD this also just can plain mean they suck at making decisions, but I like to put it in a funny trivial way.