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One of the senior marketing staff of Microsoft’s French Xbox division has put an end to rumours of any sort of 2012 launch of new Xbox hardware, saying: “What’s certain is that there will be nothing new in 2012.”
Cedrick Delmas went on to talk about Nintendo’s plans. With the Japanese console maker already having confirmed a 2012 launch for Wii U, one might expect Microsoft to try to counter it with a new product of its own, but that’s not on the cards at all.
Delmas said: “We’re not here to counter Nintendo and they’re not here to fight the other manufacturers. Nintendo has put itself in a different cycle, it’s going forward to its own rhythm, with success as we have seen with the Wii, and now it’s their turn to present their innovation.”
Nintendo can do what it wants with its odd little toys, basically, while Microsoft keeps its powder dry for a future war with Sony’s PlayStation team. [Eurogamer]
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Or is this just a ploy? The realality being they will rush out some unreliable shit again to catch the Xmas season.
Doubt it. For this year at least.
It isn’t entirely unexpected. Nintendo are be popular, but they don’t necessarily rely on the ‘hard-core’ gaming market as much as Microsoft and Sony, so whilst they are competitors, they are also not competitors – much in the same way that Jaguar and Audi compete with Ford but they don’t really compete with them, they are in the same sector but a different segment of the market with some but not universal cross-over.
Plus if they are getting Windows 8 out for tablets etc later this year, it makes sense to stagger the launches so that the investment in product launching is spread.