Toichi Wada, Square Enix President and CEO while speaking to the Financial Times says that he expects Nintendo to release their next console in 2011 to counteract their competition’s foot into the motion control craze. “Present game machines already have a lot of functions: They are a network terminal, a Blu-ray or DVD player, and a gaming machine,” adding “Compared to these three pillars, the [new motion] controllers are quite limited, so the impact may be small. They are an extension of the gaming function”. Wada is predicting a new controller and feature set to thwart Xbox 360’s Natal and PlayStation 3’s motion eye.
Although this is not an official announcement, many other developers and analysts are expecting Nintendo to release a new console around that time frame. Furthermore, Square Enix as one of the powerhouse games developer has major sway in influence with the 3 major game companies as seen in the past with launch of the xbox360 and the recent ps3 slim.
There seem to be a lot of these outside companies predicting what the big three should/will do with their consoles. I’m of the mind these statements are made to put pressure on companies to change hardware, price, or whatever rather than being based on some sort of insider knowledge.
I don’t quite think so, although I see where you are coming from Nate.
Most of these predictions are based on insider knowledge, especially the SE-Nintendo bond. If there is an HD wii coming in 2011, the Nintendo execs would have to let their major publishers know that it is coming, so that the publishers would know to make games for it.
Wada has been getting slight hints of the HD version of the wii for the past year, but this public prediction seems to show that it will be a little later than he (and most of us) originally thought.
In my opinion, it’s highly probable that there will be a Wii 2.0 of sorts in 2011. They’ve been releasing a new console every 5 years for a while now, so it seems logical. Plus, if they were doing something completely new (meaning not an improvement upon the current system), they would have announced it at E3 to start building hype. After all, they came up with the concept for the Wii in 2001, officially announced it in 2005, and released it in late 2006. We would be hearing about it if it were happening.