Nintendo: virtual reality is not yet ready for the mainstream market

Virtual reality is not yet ready for the mainstream market and especially not ready for people who want to play with it for a long time at a time. That says director Reggie Fils-Aimé of the American branch of Nintendo in a video interview with financial news agency Bloomberg.

Fils-Aimé speaks in the interview, starting at 32:06, about how the upcoming Nintendo NX console fits into the gaming market. He doesn’t say whether the upcoming NX will support virtual reality, but says current VR applications “are not ready for the general public yet.” Virtual reality is “not there yet,” he says. “Especially for consumers to play for a long time at a time, rather than the small snacks of entertainment that it is all about now.”

He does not provide further details about the NX, but does say that Nintendo does not focus on the speed of the hardware. “It’s not about teraflops for us,” said the Nintendo chief executive in the United States. Microsoft emphasized this week when announcing Project Scorpio that this upcoming console is four times as powerful as the current Xbox One and One S.

The NX will be released in March next year. It is unknown when the Japanese company will tell more about the new console. It is known that the new Zelda game Breath of the Wild will be released for both the current Wii U and the new NX.