It might not have a great impact on current hardware, but future home and portable consoles coming from Nintendo may feature a common development platform much like iOS or Android. This was revealed today by president Satoru Iwata said during an investor briefing.
Last year, the company reorganized its R&D divisions and integrated the handheld and home device teams into one, giving the two groups a much closer working habitat. This means future Nintendo products will be able to speak to each other like never before, opening new doors for the faltering studio.
“While we are only going to be able to start this with the next system, it will become important for us to accurately take advantage of what we have done with the Wii U architecture,” Iwata explained. “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.”
It’s possible that we could see more cross-platform titles this way, similar to how Super Smash Bros. is launching on both Wii U and 3DS. We’ll have to wait until new hardware is unveiled before we see the full effect, though.
