Some of you need to realize Nintendo, or any other first party, maintaining 2 separate systems is no longer feasible. Handheld games are no longer relatively small, low cost, low dev time affairs anymore. Developing for them actively takes away development from the "console". I don't see why this would change in the future. Despite dev tools becoming easier to use and more powerful, and middleware being more widely adopted, dev times haven't significantly decreased.
Yeah and I think mobile is the primary reason for that honestly. Which is why it's kind of interesting they went the portable route and are marketing it as a home console.
It's working for them, for now, but I sort of think they are clinging to the Japanese market where portable is more successful, but is ultimately kind of irrelevant vs the US and EU long term, and even China. I'm not sure what the Chinese trends will be as far as hardware going forward, but as it stands its primarily a PC and mobile market.
I think they may eventually realize it's smarter to go the Sony route long term and focus on a home console as mobile will just continue to evaporate the portable market. Hell mobile tech will eventually start to corrode home consoles too when the gpus will actually start to surpass the switch, and then people will just use a Bluetooth pad and stream 4k full featured AAA to their TVs. This won't be for another 10-20 years when fiber and extremely fast wifi is commonplace, but it will happen eventually. Literally why buy a box when my phone does
everything.
So yeah there are sort of trends they may or may not focus on for given periods of time. It might be smart to do a home console gen or 2, or it might not. Focusing on mobile and switch may be the smartest course as if mobile starts to kill home console sales they will have an edge with developing for mobile tech.
Sony and MS are focusing on the home console front and it's working for now, but that may start to backfire. It's also possible Nintendo not having a more powerful home console could backfire depending on if and how much mobile cannibalizes future switch iterations vs if they focused on a home console for a bit like Sony and MS are doing. Either way switch is working out well for them right now, outside of supply shortages (which wouldn't be happening if switch was a home console with an hdd, but it's hard to say if that would sell as well as switch right now).