Wii 2 will be a game changer, Ubisoft exec says
Wii 2, Project Cafe, Wii HD –– choose your appellation. Either way, a new Nintendo console will hit store shelves sometime next year, and according to Ives Guillemot, the CEO of Ubisoft, the next generation Wii is going to be a doozy.
"The platform Nintendo is coming up with is really a fantastic platform. We think it will be extremely successful," Guillemot recently told investors. "What we see is that we will be able to leverage a lot of the work we do for Xbox 360 and PS3 while we create games for the platform. So we will not have to redo completely the games that we create. We’ll be able to use all the capacity the console is giving but also use all the work we do for the other platforms."
Guillemot was speaking to investors; his comments were picked up by the tech site Eurogamer. As Eurogamer's Fred Dutton notes, Nintendo has not yet released a full spec sheet for the Wii 2, or really any details at all. But Guillemot's comments could be construed as meaning that the next Nintendo console will get much more firepower than the original Wii, which has always lagged behind the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in terms of graphical capability.
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So will the Wii 2 –– or, again, whatever this thing is going to be called –– shake up the console market? Hard to tell before we see anything. But Nintendo does have quite the track record. In a recent poll of 1,508 gamers, IGN reports that 27 percent said they were interested in the Wii 2, 28 percent said they weren't interested at all, and 45 percent remained undecided.
These polls numbers have been greeted in some quarters as proof that the Wii 2 won't have much traction, but to us, it just looks like a matter of a console that remains somewhat of a mystery. Once studios start to preview new titles, and once the Wii 2 gets a full reveal –– that should happen at the E3 expo next month –– we are pretty sure that gamers are going to start to get excited for the console.
Interested in the future of motion-sensing peripherals and platforms? Check out this report on where all this motion commotion is headed. In the meantime, to stay abreast of the big tech news, sign up for the free weekly Innovation newsletter, which is emailed out every Wednesday.
