As we move into the holiday season and Wii U sales are starting to increase thanks to recent releases like Mario Kart 8 and upcoming releases like Super Smash Bros., many die-hard fans are wondering if Nintendo plans on the Wii U having a shorter life-cycle so they can move on to the next console. According to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, while the company is always thinking about where to go next in terms of hardware, the Wii U won’t be dropped until they’ve reached its full potential.
Our mentality is, fairly soon after we launch new hardware, we already begin thinking about what’s next. That’s an ongoing process for us. In the end, what galvanizes us to move is when our developers have a great gaming experience that can’t be done on the current platform. We’re not there yet on the Wii U.
The experiments that Shigeru Miyamoto showed at E3 show that there’s a lot of innovation to be mined with Wii U. We showed off the beginnings of a Zelda game coming to Wii U. We have a lot more content to create for the Wii U, but we’re always thinking about what’s coming next.
Of course, this is true for any platform, as you can be sure the engineers at Microsoft and Sony are both researching and working on the successor to their platforms and they only launched just last year. Still, it’s nice to see top brass at Nintendo acknowledge that there’s still a lot more potential in the Wii U, despite third-party abandonment.
