Fils-Aime: Wii HD 'Will Not Be The Next Step For Us'

The Wii is the home console with the largest userbase, and yet many big-budget blockbusters, like record-breaking Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and highly-anticipated Assassin's Creed 2, only release on more powerful platforms. Perhaps this is why many industry-watchers -- most vocally, Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter -- predict that Nintendo will release an edition of the Wii capable of rendering higher-definition graphics, thereby closing the technology gap that still keeps the console just outside most people's definition of "next-gen." But Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime tells consumer weblog Kotaku that discussions over graphical power miss the point, and says he's "disappointed" that, in his view, publishers elect to exclude Wii from their next-gen offerings. "I think for those games, typically decisions are being made two years prior," Fils-Aime says. "And so the decisions two years ago were that those types of games would not be effective on the platform. But we've shown that that's just not the case. High-quality, effectively marketed against our installed base will sell, period -- end of story." Fils-Aime asserts that simply upgrading to HD is "not the way we at Nintendo do things. "The way we at Nintendo do things is, you know, when we will move to a new generation, it's because there are some fundamental things the [current] console cannot do," he says. Adds Fils-Aime: "What that says is that simply the addition of HD capability will not be the next step for us. There will be more to it. There will be additional capability. There will be additional elements, and, given that, it is far into the future."