Everything We Know About Nintendo’s Mysterious Next Game Device, the NX

For Nintendo fans, things haven't been great for a while now. The Wii U is selling at a historically terrible rate, and is going to be Nintendo's worst-selling home machine ever by a long shot. The company's portable 3DS sold well, but is long past its peak. Put those two things together, and you're looking at a paucity of software on any Nintendo platform. In that absence, people have been desperate to find out anything substantive about the company's new game machine, codenamed NX—and the E3 Expo was going to be that chance. That, at least, was the thinking before Nintendo announced it would skip the game industry's biggest trade show.

But that doesn't mean we didn't learn some things about Nintendo's next piece of gaming hardware, which it says it will discuss later this year and release in March 2017. Through examining various statements made about NX by Nintendo's developers and executives at E3, we can tease out a little bit more about what NX is—and even better, what it's not.

Forgive me for starting with the obvious, but Eiji Aonuma, producer of the Legend of Zelda series, told us that the saga's new open-world entry, Breath of the Wild, will be the same experience whether you're playing it on Wii U or NX. That shuts down any theory that NX is some wacky contraption like that patent Nintendo filed with joysticks poking up out of an oval-shaped screen. That doesn't mean it's only sticks and buttons, but it does mean it's not an iPad.

We know this because Ubisoft has now announced the second known NX game, a version of its popular motion-controlled dancing game. But wait! Doesn't that mean NX will have motion controls? Not necessarily, actually. The current console version of the game actually uses your cell phone as the controller, via a special app. So NX doesn't necessarily have native motion controls.

You'd have to have pretty much tuned out over the past decade to not realize that Nintendo's biggest competition isn't Microsoft and Sony, but Apple and Google. For Nintendo to play catch-up and match the extensive, hardcore-gamer-oriented feature sets and horsepower of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (to say nothing of the upgraded versions announced at E3) would be an incredibly expensive undertaking that is likely to fail.

If simple common sense doesn't persuade you that this isn't Nintendo's tack, here's its American president, Reggie Fils-Aime: "For us, it's not about specs, it's not about teraflops, it's not about the horsepower of a particular system," he told Bloomberg. "Whatever Microsoft and Sony are doing in terms of talking about new systems, that's for them to fight out in that red ocean."