Honestly I would imagine the reason that there are no cheat devices and such available is because the handhelds and consoles are so much more locked-down now. Think of seventh-gen: what cheat devices existed there? Not much, pretty much the only big player was the Action Replay DS, and what was special about the DS? There was little protection: only week encryption existed on the cartridges which was cracked in 2006, suspiciously the same year the ARDS was released. There was no way of updating the DS, so these cheat cartridges could stay. Once the DSi was released, it contained a list of "allowed" cartridges. Flashcart makers prompty realised they could bypass this by simulating another game. Once again, Datel followed suit with the ARDSi.
It's a similar story with the Wii. Around 2007 the Trucha bug was discovered, allowing discs containing unsigned content to be run on the Wii. Datel promptly released the Wii Freeloader. A little known fact is that the Action Replay Wii was
first released to stores unannounced, just a few days before a system update was released fixing the bug. Datel obviously quickly pulled both products, and left little trace of the Action Replay Wii's existance (I only know about it because I happened to catch a page describing it just before it was pulled). Later on, another exploit was discovered, Bannerbomb. This, unlike other exploits, did not require a game to run. Why didn't Datel release anything taking advantage of this? Because they knew it was fixable via a system update. And sure enough, update 4.3 comes along and patches it. Much further on, the Wii U has been released and no system updates have happened for at least a year. A new exploit, Letterbomb, is released, again requiring no game. Datel decides to wait a few months, and when no patch arrives, releases a new Action Replay Wii.
The reason very few cheat devices have been released for the new consoles is because there are no exploits, and when they are found they are quickly patched out. For Datel to release a new cheat device, two things need to occur:
- An suitable (meaning no specific games required) exploit needs to be found (Datel's engineers rarely accomplish this themselves, instead stealing the work of others).
- The exploit needs to be either unfixable, or Datel need to be sure that it will not be fixed.
As you can tell, this doesn't happen often, which is why there have been no cheat devices recently.
