Over the last year, there has been plenty of speculation surrounding Nintendo Co Ltd’s next game console, which the Japanese company has been calling “NX.” After the somewhat lackluster launch of Wii U, which has continued to trail far behind the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Nintendo has been rumored to be speeding along development on NX, but in a recent interview with Time, Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said that while development on the next console is well under way, the company is still dedicated to supporting the Wii U.

“What I want to do, I think our first job right now is to make sure that the customers, those 10 million customers who have a Wii U at home have software to play,” Kimishima said. “And we need to make sure that they are satisfied with their purchase and continue to enjoy playing on this platform. So we can’t just abandon them and say ‘Hey, it’s time to move on to the next thing.’ ”

He added, “Of course we are working on NX and looking at the experiences we can bring to that platform. But first our job at this point is to support the consumers who have purchased Wii U and make sure that they have software experiences available to them.”

But while Nintendo may be planning on eventually releasing some big name first-party titles for Wii U, the system continues to be notably lacking in third-party titles, and several of the industry’s most popular series are absent from the console, especially in the West.

This includes some of this year’s biggest releases, such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Star Wars Battlefront, and  Fallout 4, none of which will be released on Wii U.

NX will be “different and obviously a new experience”

Of course, a lack of third-party titles isn’t exactly new to Nintendo, even if the problem may be more pronounced with Wii U, and the company may be able to turn things around with NX, which Kimishima describes as an entirely new type of system.

“As far as NX goes, I’ve said it’s different and obviously a new experience,” Kimishima said. “If you look back to the beginning of our conversation today, we talked about the transition from Wii hardware to the Wii U hardware and how difficult it is to explain to the consumer base what is different and new about the new hardware. It’s difficult to convince them to switch from their current platform to the next platform.”

“That being said, I can assure you we’re not building the next version of Wii or Wii U. It’s something unique and different. It’s something where we have to move away from those platforms in order to make it something that will appeal to our consumer base.”

Photo by FaruSantos