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Earlier in the month, Nikkei.com reported that Nintendo have plans to unite their home console and portable hardware development divisions. The new division that they form will be called the “Integrated Research & Development Division,” according to Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata.
As previously reported, the goal of this new division is to enable Nintendo to develop future hardware that will “turn heads” and will also increase the interoperability between their home consoles and portable systems.
“What we mean by integrating platforms is not integrating handhelds devices and home consoles to make only one machine,” Iwata explained at the company’s third quarter financial results briefing.
He elaborated: “What we are aiming at is to integrate the architecture to form a common basis for software development so that we can make software assets more transferrable, and operating systems and their build-in applications more portable, regardless of form factor or performance of each platform.”
In a nutshell, that means that the architecture, services and even operating systems will be shared between Nintendo’s future devices, regardless of whether they’re portables or home consoles. One of the positive effects this will have, Iwata says, is that it will help avoid software shortages that tend to happen after the launch of new hardware.
“Although it has not been long since we began to integrate the architecture and this will have no short-term result, we believe that it will provide a great benefit to our platform business in the long run,” Iwata stated.
