I like my physical game discs and tangible boxes. Thank you, Nintendo, for not abolishing them.

In an interview with Edge Magazine, Laurent Fischer – Nintendo of Europe’s MD of marketing and public relations – said that Nintendo isn’t planning to jump on the boat with Apple and other companies to switch to a download-only system of delivering games and applications.

We have been very clearly communicating for a long time that the packaged software or retail market is the one that’s going to drive the mass market.

We have never seen any link between growth in the mobile gaming market and decrease in the normal software market. It’s two different markets, two different topics. We couldn’t find any evidence of those two markets being linked.

Although this was said at the Nintendo 3DS Preview Event in Amsterdam, it’s reasonable to assume that the comment applies to Nintendo’s strategies as a whole, not just in the portable space.

So when the Wii 2 comes out, you can rest assured that you’ll still be rushing out to local stores to get your hands on new games. Personally, I love that Nintendo’s going this direction, as it means I’ll still be able to line up and gloat over my game collection. The thrill of bringing a game hope and eagerly ripping off the shrink wrap won’t be going anywhere, either. It also means that the Wii 2 won’t be the end of exciting midnight launches or awesome pre-order bonuses and collectors’ editions of games.

You can see that I’m in favour of Nintendo’s decision to keep supporting physical formats, but what do you think of it? Would you rather have the convenience of choosing your games to play from the comfort of your couch, or do you prefer the gratifying feeling of physically owning your games?

Source: Edge Magazine via 3DSConnect (thanks for sending this in, Mark!)

All of these “news stories” coming from Michael Pachter are making me wonder whether there are any other noteworthy video game industry analysts out there. If you’re one of them, and you’re reading this, let me know.

So, the latest word from Pachter (coming from the last episode of Pach-Attack) is that the Wii is not, in fact, obsolete – as long as you only buy it to play Nintendo’s own games. “If you want to play Nintendo games then the Wii will never be obsolete,” he says. Going on about backwards compatibility, he continues:

“Yes I think that when a Wii 2 comes out, that it will be fully backward compatible. So, when the Wii 2 comes out the only reason to buy a Wii is that you either can’t afford it or you don’t have a high-definition monitor and you don’t need it. I think that since we are very likely going to see a Wii 2 in 2011, and, just an edit here, I’ve said it for 2009 and 2010 so I’m just going to keep saying it until it comes out.”

You can draw your own conclusions about what he just said in the last line there. I don’t think I need to say too much at this point, if you’ve been hearing Pachter’s words for as long as I have.

On a side note, I’d like to add that Pachter said that Nintendo was going to be doomed unless they released a Wii HD or Wii 2 back in November. Now, he’s contradicting his own opinion by defending Nintendo, using their fan base as his primary argument. He did, however, make it doubly clear that he still sees the PS3 as a Wii rival, but that Kinect is different enough not to be a “Wii killer.”

To answer your question about being obsolete due to PlayStation Move and Kinect, Move is the Wii HD and it really does work just like the Wii does in high-definition and it will have a large line-up of games. Kinect is different, but certainly not a Wii killer. For people buying their first console, Kinect is sufficiently novel and enough to keep them from buying it. Nintendo is still selling about as many consoles as the Xbox 360 so no, I don’t think the Wii is obsolete at all and I don’t think it’ll be obsolete until Nintendo stops making software and that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Source: Nintendo Universe

In an interview with the German magazine Spiegel (translation after the break), Miyamoto was thought to have confirmed that 3D is too small a niche for it to be incorporated into the Wii’s successor. However, some recent comments from Nintendo UK’s Head of Communications, Rob Saunders, bring the possibility back to light. In an interview with GamingBolt, he had the following the say following a question about whether Nintendo was planning to support 3D in the Wii 2 following the critical acclaim of the 3DS.

It’s a good question. The honest answer is that if I told you I’d have to kill you. We’ve had 3D running on past consoles for a number of years and we have had 3D running on the original DS, the Gamecube and the Wii. That’s no secret, we said that at E3 last year, but now it feels like the right time to bring 3D to the market. So “never say never”; we’re always working on new consoles and new applications, things like that.  I can’t give you a world exclusive I’m afraid!

Take this with a grain of salt, however, as he admits that he doesn’t know anything about the Wii 2 in this next quote from the interview:

We’re always very keen at Nintendo, we always start work on the next home console as soon as the previous one’s released. So we are working on something and we’re always looking at new ideas and new developments, so that work is underway. As to what it pertains to and what it is… Even I don’t know!

Source: GamingBolt, via GoNintendo Continue reading…

Brian Ferrel, THQ’s CEO, commented at a Goldman Sachs conference yesterday that he wouldn’t be surprised if he saw Nintendo reveal the Wii 2 sometime this year. As part of his response to an investor’s question about rising stock prices, he said:

We don’t expect new hardware any time soon from either Microsoft or Sony. It’s difficult on Nintendo – we’ll let them announce their new hardware.

He clearly said how he doesn’t expect to hear anything about a PlayStation 4 or an Xbox 720 anytime soon, but made a point of differentiating Nintendo from the two, implying that he believes a chance of Nintendo revealing their next-generation home console before the competition does.

Source: CVG

Nintendo said before that they’ve still got lots of things in mind for the Wii. I was a bit skeptical of that, because it seems they’ve already done everything they can: we’ve already had three main-series Mario platformers, two Zelda adventures (well, one if you don’t consider Twilight Princess a Wii game), two Metroids (not counting the excellent ports of Metroid Prime 1 and 2 in Metroid Prime Trilogy), the first console Kirby adventure in years, a barrage of casually-oriented “Wii” titles, the multiplayer essentials like Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros., and a whole lot more. I thought that everything had already been done.

Well, I thought wrong. Nintendo are gonna give the Wii a second Kirby game and a new Rhythm Heaven in 2011. Need proof? Check out the short trailers they released during their latest investors’ conference.

Thanks, Play4Fun!

Although this site is formally known as “Wii 2 Blog,” the “Wii 2” part of it is really just a placeholder for whatever the Wii’s successor will eventually be called. Until we get an official announcement of some kind from Nintendo themselves, we’re all free to call it whatever we want.

Wertville, one of the users at our bustling forums, likes to refer to the system as the (get ready for this) Super Wii Cube Entertainment System 64, or SWES64 for “short.” He’s made a nice-looking logo in a forum-friendly size, which you see above. Feel free to embed it into your signature on any forums you happen to go to using the following BBCode:

Today, I stumbled across a wonderful speculative editorial by Andreas Garbe aka Falafelkid about the Wii’s successor. He’s done his homework and believes that it will be a 3D-capable system, for good reason (despite some comments to the contrary earlier).

Of course, there are limitations imposed by parallax barrier technology, which is what is currently used in glassesless 3D TVs as well as the 3DS; but Andreas thinks that Nintendo may try to avoid this with a proprietary 3D display, noting that they had previously experimented with such a solution when they were still developing the GameCube.

I’ll stop there, because the work he’s put into this article is magnificent, and the last thing I want to do is butcher it. It’s a great read you might want to look into if you feel starved of real Wii 2 information (like I do). Check it out here.

Remember this? Good times, good times...

Satoru Iwata is going to be making a presentation at GDC 2011 (that’s the Game Developer’s Conference, in case you’re unfamiliar with it). While no one knows what exactly he’s planning to talk about, there’s a rumour brewing that he’ll give us the first look at the Wii’s successor. This seemingly baseless rumour stems mostly from the fact that GDC 2005 marked the public revelation of the Wii – then famously known as “Revolution.”

Most release date rumours are currently pointing towards a 2012 launch for the Wii’s successor, which falls right in line with Nintendo’s history of releasing new consoles not too late after their latest generation of handhelds. Therefore, I wouldn’t be surprised if Iwata threw us a bone this year, as little as it may be (you might remember that the Wii’s motion controls were kept secret until it was fairly close to launch time). If he does say anything about it, don’t expect it to be anything too juicy: maybe a codename, a few vague, carefully worded statements that will be quoted and requoted all over the Internet for the next six months, and perhaps even a mysterious picture or other.

In case you want to mark it on your calendar, GDC 2011 begins on February 28th – just two days after the 3DS’s Japanese release – and continues through March 4th. While we know the dates of the event, we’ve yet to find out on which day of it Iwata will be holding his little speech.

Source: GDC

On a side note, sorry for the lack of updates as of late. Not only has there been a general lack of Wii 2-related news and rumours to write about, but I’ve been having some bad computer troubles, too. As always, if you find anything interesting you think is worth posting to this site, feel free to send it in anytime!

Nintendo put out a press release today that revealed some interesting figures about the Wii’s sales. According to the release, the Wii is now well past an impressive 34 million units sold in the US. This is one third of the way there to meeting the goal of 45 million US consoles Reggie set back in November.

Additionally, the press release notes that the Wii is the first console in the world to have sold over 7 million units per year for three consecutive years in a row. It’s quite impressive and reassuring to hear, particularly after the news came of the little white box supposedly slowing down.

Thanks to big releases like Retro Studios' Donkey Kong Country Returns, the Wii had a monster of a holiday season.

Responsible for this jump in numbers has, for a large part, been the monster Black Friday Nintendo had, as well as the releases of a number of notable games since November (when the Wii was still at just 30 million). I think we can expect the next massive spike of sales when The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword hits later this year, after which I believe the Wii will slowly start tweeting off into the sunset for the final few million sales (unless Nintendo come out and surprise us with something else super-awesome after Zelda). Once they reach the goal, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nintendo had the Wii’s successor ready to reveal as soon as a week or two later; the 3DS, if you recall, was revealed quite suddenly, too.

Source: Nintendo

I don’t believe that there’s a chance of this happening at all, but it’s nonetheless an interesting concept I believe is worth mentioning.

xpersiussa of the IGN Boards was thinking that there might not be a separate Wii 2 at all; that the Wii 2 would simply be a 3DS plugged into a TV. He backs this up by saying that the 3DS can use its graphical horsepower to render higher-quality graphics instead of a three-dimensional image. It would be turned into a “Wii 2” by means of a dock you pop the 3DS into, which connects it to your TV. After you’ve docked it, you’d use a wireless remote or controller to control the system.

There are several flaws with the theory, though: for one, even though the 3DS is very powerful for a handheld, I highly doubt it has enough oomph to produce the HD visuals console gamers demand these days – when not rendering in 3D, its resolution is 400×240, compared to the 1920×1080 of a modern HDTV. It seems more like an Apple-y thing to do, but I digress.

In addition to that, the home console market is worth millions and millions to Nintendo, and they would never jeopardize its existence by creating a singular handheld to replace it completely like this. Rather, I believe Nintendo will devise some kind of connectivity between the 3DS and the (separate) Wii 2, like they have done in the past (the GameBoy Advance connected to the GameCube, and the DS to the Wii) – only this time, I expect it to be better and genuinely useful.