‘Nintendo NX’ Launch Date Delayed To Cash In On Predicted $30B Industry

“Nintendo’s” next generation console the “NX” will not be released this year, as first scheduled. According to Digitimes, it will instead be mass-produced in mid-2017, though the video game company does present some good reasons as to why they decided to deprive their customers of the console for a few more months.

Sources in the production side told Digitimes that Nintendo wanted to add more features to their consoles in order to remain competitive in a market that has left their original design behind. These features include enhancements when it came to how the integration between handheld devices and video games played on the console.

Players will be able to play games on the console like they would with a mobile device and then plug it into a TV if they want to play with a bigger screen. There’s also the addition of a virtual reality (VR) feature, which is most likely in response to the booming VR industry that companies like “Oculus” are finding highly profitable at the moment.

Back in April, Business Insider covered the findings of Digi-Capital, which stated that the VR industry could become a $30 billion goldmine by 2020. These findings resulted in an arms race among video game companies to incorporate VR technology in their own hardware and titles, and “Nintendo” is just one among many to start riding the band wagon.

As a result of the delay, gamers can expect that the “NX” won’t hit stores until late 2017 at the soonest; sources from the production line told Digitimes that they were ordered by “Nintendo” to start mass producing components of the console by the end of 2016.

More than that, it would seem that the original order of the game company was for 20 million, but they have since reduced the number to a measly 10 million. This was supposedly in response to the shrinking market for video game consoles.