Nintendo’s got a new game platform brewing. Here’s what we know so far.
Everyone’s abuzz with the news that Nintendo will make smartphone games, but in the midst of that announcement this week it dropped another bombshell: It’s close to announcing a new dedicated gaming platform, codenamed NX, which it will unveil in 2016.
NX, said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata when he announced it, should be taken as “proof that Nintendo maintains strong enthusiasm for the dedicated game system business.”
“I wanted to communicate that Nintendo will be progressing with videogame-dedicated devices with a passion,” Iwata said during a Q&A session following the presentation. “We wanted to make it clear that Nintendo will continue with that as our core business.”
Since then, Nintendo refuses to say even a little bit more about NX, other than the fact that it is built around “a brand-new concept.” From the company that brought us the Virtual Boy, this tells us absolutely nothing. So of course, in the absence of information, there’s been tons of speculation as to what it might be.
We actually do have more information, though, that can guide us in the right direction.
Nintendo’s handheld and home console development teams had always been separate, and created totally different types of game machine. The fact that the home and portable machines were such different pieces of technology had begun to prove very frustrating to Nintendo. Iwata said in a presentation to investors in March 2014 that while Nintendo wanted to port Wii games to the Nintendo 3DS, or bring Nintendo 3DS titles to the Wii U, it found that because the architectures were so different, it required “a huge amount of effort.”
But in 2013, Iwata unified the hardware divisions into a single team, saying in that 2014 presentation that “because of vast technological advances, it became possible to achieve a fair degree of architectural integration.” This meant, he said, that porting games across platforms would be much easier, and help solve Nintendo’s current problem of “game shortages.”
Then, he began to talk about Nintendo’s “next system.”
“It will become important for us to accurately take advantage of what we have done with the Wii U architecture,” Iwata said. “It of course does not mean that we are going to use exactly the same architecture as Wii U, but we are going to create a system that can absorb the Wii U architecture adequately. When this happens, home consoles and handheld devices will no longer be completely different, and they will become like brothers in a family of systems.”
Let’s unpack what Iwata was saying here. He’s specifically talking about the merging of home and portable systems, and creating something that can “absorb the Wii U architecture.” So he is specifically talking about a handheld device that shares a common development platform with Wii U. This doesn’t mean that you would put a Wii U disc into your handheld, or even that the downloadable versions of Wii U games would Just Work on it, but that it would be simple enough to port Wii U software to this handheld.
Note that he isn’t saying that the Nintendo 3DS architecture would also need to be absorbed into this new portable. He’s talking about moving forward with Wii U specifically, not 3DS. So this sounds very much like Nintendo would be moving away from 3DS and creating a handheld device that, if anything, would use content from Wii U, not 3DS.
In case anyone in the audience was thinking that what Iwata was discussing was the merging of home consoles and handhelds into one single successor device, he was quick to put the kibosh on that. “I am not sure if the form factor (the size and configuration of the hardware) will be integrated,” he said. “In contrast, the number of form factors might increase.”
“Currently, we can only provide two form factors because if we had three or four different architectures, we would face serious shortages of software on every platform,” he said. But if Nintendo had one unified platform like Apple’s iOS, Iwata said, it could actually create more than just two different game machines each cycle. “To cite a specific case, Apple is able to release smart devices with various form factors one after another because there is one way of programming adopted by all platforms.”
“Another example is Android. Though there are various models, Android does not face software shortages because there is one common way of programming on the Android platform that works with various models. The point is, Nintendo platforms should be like those two examples.”
In conclusion, he did not rule out the possibility of a future in which Nintendo does only make a single form factor that’s used for multiple purposes: “Whether we will ultimately need just one device will be determined by what consumers demand in the future, and that is not something we know at the moment.”
So, with all of this in mind, what can we say about NX?
It can be used as a portable game device—at least. This is clear as day. Whether you can also hook it up to a TV or not, it must be a handheld. said, it’s possible that NX could also output to your television. I saw gaming video producer Ryan O’Donnell encapsulate this perfectly following the announcement, noting that Wii U was “backwards”: The guts of the machine should be in a handheld device, and the dumb terminal part should hook up to the TV.
Wii U is part of Nintendo’s future, but 3DS may not be. 3DS is the dog that didn’t bark in this scenario. I pointed this out when I discussed Kirby and the Rainbow Curse for Wii U, but the Nintendo 3DS is actually not a very good touchscreen gaming device. Having a 3-D top screen and a 2-D touch screen doesn’t actually work, since it relegates the touchscreen to only secondary use scenarios, like extra virtual buttons in Legend of Zelda.
Nintendo may need to rip off the Band-Aid at some point and develop a portable machine that is not backward compatible with 3DS. NX could be it, and its backward compatibility (after a fashion) may only extend to Wii U. I don’t know where this leaves the future of glasses-free 3-D displays. Maybe NX has one screen that can swap between touch-sensitive and 3-D display modes. Maybe 2-D is the future.
NX is probably a suite of devices, not a single one. What we’ll probably see in 2016 when Nintendo takes the wraps off NX is the tip of the spear. Nintendo will need something that’s primarily portable to take the baton from 3DS. But even if the device we see doesn’t also work in the home, Nintendo will likely unveil other form factors that play similar (or identical) games but have different home-portable configurations. Maybe the hybrid device is real, but it’s not the first thing in stores. Maybe there’s a device that only works with the TV, but is significantly cheaper since it has no screen.
As for the rest, all we can do is speculate until 2016.
