New Nintendo 3DS (regular size), OG Nintendo 3DS discontinued in Japan

Today, Nintendo launched a brand new model of Nintendo 3DS in Japan: the New Nintendo 2DS XL (releasing on July 28th in Europe and North America). It’s actually the 6th model, following the original Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo 3DS XL, the Nintendo 2DS, the New Nintendo 3DS, and the New Nintendo 3DS XL.

And as you can imagine, retailers cannot carry 12 different models (not to mention each one gets its own bundles / packages, and colour variants), which is why models are discontinued after a while. And as we expected, Nintendo officially discontinued one today… two, in fact!

Here’s the two Nintendo 3DS models officially discontinued today in Japan:

• New Nintendo 3DS (regular size only. The XL model is still available for purchase, and remains the “Premium” model for the Nintendo 3DS)
• the OG Nintendo 3DS

The OG Nintendo 3DS was discontinued several years ago in Europe and North America, but in Japan, Nintendo was still selling it until pretty recently. Of course, sales had already slowed down to a crawl, and in fact, both Media Create and Famitsu stopped tracking it in January. Today, Nintendo finally announced that this particular model had finally been discontinued. Quite surprisingly, this makes it the longest-running one!

Unfortunately, if you’re looking for a regular-size Nintendo 3DS with 3D display, you’re out of luck as the New Nintendo 3DS was also discontinued today. Now, your only remaining option for a regular-size model is the Nintendo 2DS, but as the name implies, it doesn’t have 3D.

The fact that both remaining “regular-size + 3D” models have been discontinued shows there isn’t much of a market left for them (and weekly sales data have been confirming that for a while: the “XL” models have always been far more popular, even when the New Nintendo 3DS and the New Nintendo 3DS XL were launched simultaneously).

Naturally, this announcement only applies to the Japanese market, so we don’t know if/when the New Nintendo 3DS will be discontinued in Europe (it wasn’t available outside of limited bundles in North America). As for the OG Nintendo 3DS, it was discontinued several years ago in the west, as mentioned above.

The New Nintendo 2DS XL comes out on July 28th in Europe and North America.

Source: Nintendo