14 DAY TRIAL // Nintendo has been going through a great period in terms of sales and popularity in the last few years, thanks to the release of the DS and Wii consoles, which have changed the way people view gaming in general.
The two devices have been breaking sales records left and right, with the small handheld console managing to ship one million units just last month across North America, even though a lot of years have passed since their releases. This demand is still pretty strong, but Nintendo is already making plans for the moment when the market will be saturated.
The President of the company, Satoru Iwata, has revealed to investors in a recent financial meeting that the Wii and DS won't last forever, but the engineers at the company are hard at work creating new devices, which will be released when the time is right, even though they might be already finished and ready for production.
“We do not think that Nintendo DS and Wii will last forever,” Iwata says. “Our internal hardware teams are always researching and working on new hardware so that we can launch them whenever we find a very interesting idea. New hardware is not needed until the time our software developers see the end in making new software with the existing hardware, or unless we have no more new market to explore and all the potential consumers have purchased our hardware.”
Iwata continues and reveals that, “The more decisive factor is when the software developers will start demanding for new hardware as they cannot create any more software with surprise factors with the existing one. Nintendo has always been making the hardware in order to prepare for that day to come.”
So, it seems that Nintendo is already making long-term plans regarding new devices, with the most speculated one being an HD version of the Wii, which would put it on a par with current generation consoles in terms of power.