Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima confirmed that their next console, codenamed the NX, will be very different from the Wii and Wii U.
Speaking with TIME Magazine, the president explained the difficulties they faced coming from a successful Wii platform to Wii U and what that means for the NX, “If you look back to the beginning of our conversation today, we talked about the transition from Wii hardware to the Wii U hardware and how difficult it is to explain to the consumer base what is different and new about the new hardware. It’s difficult to convince them to switch from their current platform to the next platform.”
“That being said, I can assure you we’re not building the next version of Wii or Wii U. It’s something unique and different. It’s something where we have to move away from those platforms in order to make it something that will appeal to our consumer base.”
Kimishima explained Nintendo’s position on Wii U, which has sold far less than predicted, but Nintendo are not seeing it as a failure or abandoning the console. “”We’re looking at 10m sell-through for the hardware itself, which is just about a tenth of what we sold overall for Wii….What I want to do, I think our first job right now is to make sure that the customers, those 10 million customers who have a Wii U at home have software to play. And we need to make sure that they are satisfied with their purchase and continue to enjoy playing on this platform.
So we can’t just abandon them and say ‘Hey, it’s time to move on to the next thing.’ Of course we are working on NX and looking at the experiences we can bring to that platform. But first our job at this point is to support the consumers who have purchase Wii U and make sure that they have software experiences available to them.”
