How will NVLINK benefit gamers in the future? Or is that dead already? And why did NVIDIA heavily depend on game developers to support SLI to begin with? I assumed NVLINK fixed this problem by stacking both VRAM and GPU power into one source from both cards to scale graphics. It appears NVIDIA's future is now based on single GPU architecture.

Looking pretty dead atm, but it could come back if developers will implement sli natively.
 

Digital_Fuzion
And why did NVIDIA heavily depend on game developers to support SLI to begin with?

Nvidia provided all the sli profiles themselves until DX12 came along, and prevented nvidia's old techniques from working that allowed sli to work under DX9, 10 & 11 games.
 
No big deal as game developers are able to implement SLI support natively within the game itself with DX12 & Vulkan instead of relying upon a SLI driver profile. The expertise of the game developer within their own code allows them to achieve the best possible performance from multiple GPUs instead of relying on old techniques such as AFR (Alternate Frame Rending) which introduce non-uniform flip intervals (microstutter), Interframe dependencies (possible corruption), & Input latency which does not reduce with increased performance. Nvidia says they will focus efforts on supporting developers to implement SLI natively inside the games via Frame Pipelining a new feature of DX12 which didn't exist in DX11 and isn't limited to AFR as they believe this will provide the best performance for SLI users. 

neodinardo
I’d rather have a bigger dual GPU card for one slot vs SLI.

Dual GPU cards still use SLI technology to function.

CausticEd
I would love for the SLI to work for me, but I am not sure if I can make two work from a heat perspective.  Have folks found heat to be an issue?

 
Heat has always been an issue with SLI.  That is why I go with watercooling rather than air cooling.  The other option, with a large enough case, you could always go with Hybrid cards which would allow the heat to be pumped out of the case.  
 
As for Air Cooled Cards, I wouldn't SLI any of these cards on a motherboard with 3 slot spacing.  That would leave the card with .25 - .5 of breathing room, which just isn't enough for these air cooled cards.

SLI is hard