It's time to move up boys.

In a past newspaper interview, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata said that Nintendo would only consider a successor to the Wii once developers could no longer offer surprises with the Wii.

It looks like that has happened! Following today's announcement of Wii's successor, Nintendo held a press conference in Osaka. Kyodo News reports that as reason for the followup system's release, Iwata said "It became difficult for developers to surprise customers with the current Wii."

Covering the same press conference, Bloomberg reports that Iwata insisted "We will offer something new for home game systems."

Whatever surprises Nintendo has in store for the system, 3D may not be one of them. Iwata also said that considering that 3D televisions have yet to spread widely, making 3D into a central point of the system would be difficult.

http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2011/04/25/iwata_on_wii_2/

It was reasonable to launch a new system. 5-7 year life is typically what is expected of a console. 

More like they didn't want to make games for Wii - Hopefully this console will be better

At this point it's understandable that they don't want to continue with the Wii. The console's image has been severly damaged and without good third party support in the next couple of years everything Nintendo could do wouldn't amount too much. You might as well start over.

I don't know what he's going on about. Everytime I see third-party releases for the Wii, I'm quite surprised.

I don't know. Once you've gotten used to expect failure, there isn't much of a surprise anymore. Of course, looking at this in reverse means that every good third party game does create surprise.

So I guess by that metric, you haven't been surprised in quite a while, eh?

I've got to admit that I laughed at this. :P

I expected 8-10 years... Wii has three and some months... a successor is very early.

Even at its peak, it was never in doubt that the Wii wouldn't have been able to live an 8 year cycle.