Companies are hemorrhaging money and jobs. Even Nintendo is cutting its profit forecast. That's not to say the company is cutting back on everything, though. Nintendo's expanding.

It's been revealed that the end of last year, the company forked over approximately ¥12.8 billion for a 40,000 square meter piece of property near the current Nintendo headquarters. The property was a golf driving range. 

With an increase in global demand for Nintendo products, the company plans to use the site for new game software and hardware R&D. Nintendo is planning to integrate its current R&D center. However, construction is still TBA. 

A new R&D facility, huh? Wonder whatever they'll be creating.

From Kotaku

A whole system upgrade via firmware that allows you to make popcorn even while you play SSBB.

for software and hardware eh

this is good

i'm sure their building this whole new research facility to figure out a wii storage solution. what else could this place be for? researching exciting news methods of storing money? ha!

Being that it is entirely possible that Nintendo will produce a peice of hardware that is (roughly) 100 times as powerful as the Wii for their next generation system, it is plausable that Nintendo has to rework their entire code-base before they begin working on next-generation products.

This seems most likely. Nintendo's world is changing rapidly on the technological front, as well as the software front. They need more resources to handle them, and this seems to sit with that

EDIT (Addition): Kotaku comments. Always good for a quick laugh.

i think the wii itself has a 10-year plan (much more likely than sony having one for the ps3) so they are probably doing research on stuff like...

how much different motion sensing technologies will cost in a few years.

if things like virtual realty will be cost effective (and can they make them intuitive and easy to understand like the wii's controls? that ones gonna be a toughy).

likely prices of different hardware components in the same time frame.

they'll likely have the wii succesor's hardware and control's mostly set a couple years before they announce it, so they can have some time to make quality software for launch.

maybe simply more different kinds of controls for the wii. if it's gonna be on the market for more than a few more years, they probably want to release some new ones for that.

they'll likely have armed bodyguards guarding the whole building to prevent any leaking of information (hey, they gotta spend all those gobs of money one SOMETHING, right?)


ok, fine. half of that stuff is me not having enough sleep last night, but i'm just throwing some ideas out.

First thing i thought of, Flying machines, virtual reality and Terminator. I dk why

I'll see vonboy's predictions, and raise him new methods of torturing third parties who put out Game Party and Dogz.

Maybe they will start making good games now. :)