Nintendo to announce new console: Nintendo NX

Nintendo is on the verge of announcing their newest console to the public, the “Nintendo NX.” However, this may be the company’s last stand in the home console market if previous sales are any indication.

Nintendo’s current console in stores now is the “Nintendo Wii U” and according to IR Information on Nintendo’s personal website, the Wii U has only sold 13.02 million hardware units in its lifetime as of June 30, 2016. This means that the Wii U has had roughly over one-tenth of the lifetime sales of the previous Nintendo console, the Wii with lifetime sales of 101.63 million units. The contributing factors that made the Wii U fail was a lack of third party support – (hardly any games from EA, Actision, etc.) tablet controls that can also be found in customer’s apps through smartphones or their own tablets, and overall confusion of what made the product different from the Wii.

Nintendo’s own president of Nintendo America, Reggie Fils-Aime is owing to the mistakes that the company made with the Wii U to ensure customers the NX won’t be the same.

In an interview with AList, Fils-Aime stated, “One of the things that we have to do better when we launch the NX, is we have to do a better job communicating the positioning for the product. We have to do a better job helping people to understand its uniqueness and what that means for the game playing experience. We have to do a better job from a software planning standpoint.

How will the NX try establish itself as the newest hardware in a world where Microsoft and Sony are getting ready to release hardware capably of rendering 4K, smoother performances, and other high-tech extravagances?

Rumors have been floating around the internet that Nintendo’s NX has yet another screen controller, but that it can be “plugged” into a base that turns a handheld into a console. Many speculate that the NX can be turned into a handheld when gamers are on the go and then connect to a base to play when at home.

The latest rumor is that the NX will take some of best features of Sony’s PS4 and utilize a “share functionality” to allow players to share pictures and videos across the internet. This is huge news, as Nintendo is one of the few gaming companies has some detests from having content shared and has even issued cease and desist to everyone from vloggers to fan made projects.

Nintendo has gone on record saying the NX will have a new Mario game, some sort of Pokémon game, and will be launching with the new Zelda game “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.”