True next-gen Wii HD appearing this week?

Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 01 October 2008 12:42

Your IT - Entertainment

Thursday sees some Nintendo press conference in Japan and San Francisco – Rumours are spreading about a new DS with inbuilt camera and music playback.  More recently the mongers are pointing their rumour sticks towards a transition of Wii hardware making a show.

File under rumours for now – but some whispers are being generated that come this Thursday in Japan and the US. The world will see new Nintendo hardware being wheeled into pubic.

A couple of days ago, the good money was on an enhanced Nintendo DS handheld. 

The already popular device supposedly about to sport a camera and music playback, check Davey’s story here .

Now it looks as if Nintendo could unveil  true next generation Wii hardware set for release to the market by 2011.

Over at What They Play is an article referring to multiple sources in the game development and publishing community.   All of which believe that the upcoming press conferences will show a Wii HD console with the following attributes.

* Backwards compatibility
* Digital software distibution
* Local storage such as a Hard Drive or flash memory capacity
* High Definition visuals

All of which are reasonably pedestrian expectations of a console in 2011 (if not today).  What They Play believe that much of this can be attributed to the fact that Nintndo are spending ever more on R&D.

“Based on figures from Nintendo’s annual financial reports, the company is currently spending more than ten times as much on research and development as it was five years ago, and since the Wii was launched in 2006, R&D spending has more than tripled. While this could be attributed to any number of additional projects, the level of spending suggests that a large project is in the works. In 2003, Nintendo declared that $34 million was spent on R&D. This figure steadily climbed to $103 million in 2006 (the year that the Wii launched) and the following year bumped dramatically to $370 million. When asked to explain the escalated spending, Nintendo representatives were unable to provide comment.”

According to the report, the Nintendo plan is to transition consumers to the new Wii HD in a similar way to the move from Game Boy to Game Boy Advance hardware.  Perhaps at a different level of cost however.

We only have to wait another couple of days.