14 DAY TRIAL // Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo in Japan, hinted that a successor to the DS handheld was being readied for launch later in the year and that it might have a motion sensor. The company he heads has since stated that his words were misinterpreted by the media. But the rumors about the impending announcement of a new Nintendo made handheld will simply not die and at least one videogame industry analyst believes that we will see it in less than eight months.
Jesse Divnich, who is an analyst for EEDAR, said that “one of the biggest reasons for Nintendo’s success in the handheld market is their ability to remove opportunity gaps for competitors to enter. Nintendo’s transition from the GBA to the DS, a year earlier than anticipated, was a brilliant strategy to remove any upper hand the Sony PSP could have by being first to market.”
If Nintendo follows the same game plan in 2010, the main reasons will probably not be the release of the PlayStation Portable Go, which is already shaping up to be a disappointment for Sony, but the continuing success of the Apple made iPhone, which is becoming an important platform for gaming on the go. Pushing out a DS2 handheld offering some kind of motion tracking and more multimedia capabilities might be a significant step in reassuring publishers and gamers that the DS still counts.
Divnich believes that the new model of the handheld will probably have backward compatibility to make it more attractive to those who already have a large library of titles, and will have more antipiracy features, making the platform more attractive to publishers like Ubisoft, Capcom and SEGA, who are now saying they plan to limit their exposure to the Nintendo device. As always, Nintendo would not comment on any speculation related to its future plans.