Various reasons. Most importantly, Nintendo makes their own hardware primarily for the sake of their own games. Taxing other developers to publish on their pla

Various reasons. Most importantly, Nintendo makes their own hardware primarily for the sake of their own games. Taxing other developers to publish on their platform is a bonus, not their main source of revenue. They're structured such that they can continuously produce games that will confidently sell millions of copies at full retail price, several times a year, and almost never go over budget. They work this way because they've been let down by third parties numerous times in their history, so they don't want to trust the future of their company to anyone but themselves and their most trusted partners. If that's the way they feel about proven megadevelopers that they've been working alongside for decades, why on earth would they care about unproven indies and the producers of "social" Skinner boxes? They'd have little to gain from the occasional indie hit (Nintendo already lets proven indies onto their eShop), and so much to lose with having to share a marketplace with thousands of glorified slot machines and babby's first helicopter tunnel games and the resulting loss in customer confidence such a change would cause; the second most significant reason that I own a 3DS, after "because I want to play Nintendo's games" is "because I don't have to wade through pages of shovelware to find something good." It feels kinda like how it felt to use Steam before they opened the floodgates to mediocrity with the Greenlight process. (Similarly, people miss the point when they suggest that they should drop their hardware business and make iPhone games. Putting aside that most of their games simply wouldn't work with touch controls, why on earth would they give up a profitable hardware business, primary promotional status in their marketplace, and a customer base willing to frequently spend full retail price for their games, that will stick with them for a lifetime... and in return get to be in a marketplace where they are just another competitor, where visibility is algorithmically determined, where they are entirely at the whims and mercy of another (notoriously fickle) company, and whose vast majority of users are entitled cheapskates that treat games as 30 second diversions for when you're stuck in a line?) The other very important reason why Nintendo doesn't want a public SDK is because they were burned horribly by piracy for the DS and Wii. They really don't want to give away devkits to anyone with $100 if it could contribute to the discovery of an unpatchable vulnerability. Don't get me wrong, it's a little sad to say all of that, because the 3DS is pretty much the only platform other than desktops that I'm actually interested in developing for. I just know that it would be a fatal mistake for Nintendo to shift the focus away from their IPs to being just another platform holder.