Nintendo Prez Suggests Next Console Could Be 3D

It's a good week for Nintendo to be hinting at their next console going 3D. After all, their 3DS portable has been lapped up by every dog in town for E3, and all eyes are on Ninty's next move.

Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's President, told the Japanese publication paper that they were certainly looking at making other products 3D.

"If you display a 3D image, the image quality becomes extremely bad, so we'd probably do it with the next system...We're thinking that the timing should be once the 3D television adoption rates crosses the 30% mark. We're looking at the adoption trends."

As you know, the 3DS doesn't use 3D technology like we've seen before. It's using glasses-less parallex barrier technology created by Sharp (we believe, anyway), so if Nintendo goes down the 3D route for consoles, they'd have to do it properly. Only launching it once the market suggests it's not just a fad (proven by the 30 per cent market share Iwata mentioned) is the obvious move—but so far, it's looking like that'll take a loooooong time. It's believed Europe, for example, has bought just 25,000 3DTVs up until the end of May.

Then, there's the fact that Nintendo has shied away from having disc-based media, with the Wii not even allowing for DVD playback. It infuriated many upon launch, but if Nintendo were to step up and launch a full 1080p 3D Blu-ray playing console, it'd be the biggest surprise in gaming land. Iwata himself told Nikkei that "in the future, 3D will become the mainstream of gaming" which is enough to get our shirts rolling. [Andriasang via Kotaku]