Wow, some of you guys are so quick to the punch. You feel you've wasted your money on a DS but there have already been a half dozen must have titles annoucned, and you're feeling betrayed?
Nintendo made it no secret that the DS was strictly a niche gaming market, for the truly hardcore. It was never supposed to have amazing support, it was never supposed to sell as well as it has, and I garantee the early adoption success of the DS has not only exceeded their sales expectaitons greatly, but put a suprised smile on their face. They'll continue with their DS support plan, which by the way does not include Revolution connectivity. I garantee the GBE is the reason for that, and they annoucned this shortly after E3. The GBA/DS will not be able to link to the Revolution in any way, and at that annoucnement I first felt that it'd have built in screens in the controllers, or a built in GBA Player type device. Obviously the DS needs the touch screen so that's likely out of the picture, but now that the GBE is so close to the release (maybe even coinciding?) with the Revolution, that's become the clear reason.
But I digress. Back to the issue of support for the DS, I'd be much willing to be that Nintendo actually took a cue from Sony with this. They're testing the market for how much dual screens would be utilized, for how much the touch screen would be utilized. If you think about it, the GBA->GC Connectivity pretty much directly resulted in the DS. Sony marketed the PSX as an all in one super expensive set top device and was nearly annoucned that it was simply a test bed for the PS3. See what people would utilize, how much storage capacity to use, what kind of quality parts they expect to see the best average lifespan. They've remodled that thing quite a few times and they're relying on the few to let them know how it's going. I feel the DS was never designed for commercial success, but for market feedback from the masses. They just didn't expect the masses to be so big.
I feel the touchscreen will be the saving grace for the DS owners. That will continue to keep developers intrested in staying creative and original, while they can take their safe bets and big bucks to the home consoles (and PSP, maybe even GBE).
Either way, I'm now not just stoked for E3, I'm seriously intrigued. This puts Nintendo in a very difficult position. How do you garner support for a new handheld just a year after accidentally releasing a spiritual successor to the GBA? How do you support 4 devices at once? How soon does the GBA bite the dust? Do they really intend to turn the DS into a psuedo PSP + PDA software, while loosely supporting it with Mario <insert sport>? As the industry turns...
Good news for me. I'll get some great games out of it, and probably a cheaper DS too. I still have yet to buy it (not until mario kart or metroid), but it could ultimately be the end of Nintendo. The feeling of betrayal, no matter how misplaced, is a strong one and fairly difficult to get over. I say misplaced because as of now it's all pure speculation, and if this turns out to be true listing all the stats on the incredibly strong support for the DS isn't going to help a damn thing. It certainly isn't going to be another Virtual Boy, as the DS already has more games than the Virtual Boy did and has sold faaaaar better than the VB could have ever hoped to.
Be paitent, we've only got 10 weeks until Nintendo bears their hand at E3. It'll prove to be their most interesting and important one to date.