While the Wii continues to enjoy reccord-shattering sales around the world, Nintendo, as expected, is already working on the Wii’s next-gen successor. Considering that Nintendo opted for a more revolutionary user-interface instead of enhanced graphical capabilities for the Wii, one might suspect something similar from Nintendo for its next console. However, according to a recent Forbes interview with president Satoru Iwata, “Wii 2″ might not bring as many new ideas to the table as we had previously thought.
In the Interview, Iwata stated:
We are always preparing for the next hardware. We are under development. … But the hardware is a kind of box that consumers reluctantly buy in order to play our games.
Every hardware needs some revolutionary features. This time around, it happened to be we had a revolutionary user interface. Will it be the same for the next generation? I really can’t tell. It’s natural for the current customer to expect Nintendo is going to once again do something different. If the people are expecting so many different things from Nintendo, it’s going to be difficult for us to go beyond that expectation again.
While this news may be a bit discouraging to some, keep in mind that it will most likely be many years before this next console is released. It will be challenging to develop a worthy successor for the Wii, but Nintendo still has plenty of time to do it.
