Fils-Aime 'Confident' In Current Wii Hardware

Nintendo's platform-holding rivals have been fairly vocal in recent months about buckling in for a long-haul console lifecycle, thanks to upcoming motion control technology and continuing potential in the hardware. That's placed some scrutiny on the Wii and how long the least powerful of the three current-gen hardware platforms can keep up; Microsoft's Robbie Bach recently said that as the cycle progresses, Nintendo "may have a capacity and a power problem on the graphics side that they need to deal with." But even though Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are about to angle for some of Wii's marketshare with some motion control interfaces of their own, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime says the company is not planning to unveil new hardware any time soon. "We are confident the Wii home entertainment console has a very long life in front of it," Fils-Aime told BusinessWeek, denying rumors that Nintendo may reveal some kind of hardware update at the upcoming Game Developers Conference 2010. Rumors of a Wii with greater graphical fidelity (referred to on the web commonly as "Wii HD") have been circulating for approximately two years. Rumors still persist, although Fils-Aime said in November 2009 that such a new version of the Wii is not on the cards. Nintendo recently partnered with Netflix to add for Wii the same video rental streaming service that Xbox 360 and PS3 offer; it works similar to PS3's functionality, by which a special disc needs to be in the console to stream video.