Rumor: Leaked Wii 2 Features Include Blu-ray, 1080p

Maxconsole.net has had a rumor going around lately from French gaming website Logic-Sunrise, who purports to have had the details of a “Wii 2” leaked to them from an employee of Nintendo of France.

Personally, I’m skeptical of this, to put it quite mildly. Why? Read on as we look over this rumor piece by piece.

The first thing noted about the Wii 2 is that it is supposed to have a Blu-ray drive, whose secondary aim is to halt piracy. Somehow, I have a difficult time believing that Nintendo would use Sony’s technology for their purposes, at least before attempting their own. I could be wrong, but it just seems out of character for them.

The next item of note correlates with the Blu-ray rumor, that being the system displaying resolutions of “1080p and lower.” This is, of course, to support Blu-ray movies and games.

I’m still unsure, since Nintendo has never seemed particularly eager to equip their consoles to play movies. Licensing such tech for playing movies might even drive the price further up, which is something Nintendo would likely want to avoid.

On the other hand, one would suppose that if Sony’s platform weren’t the only one capable of playing Blu-ray media, that would take away a PlayStation advantage, which must surely be enticing. But at the same time, one would think Sony themselves might realize this, and be hesitant to hand over one of the PlayStation 3’s big selling points to a competitor.

The next item on the list places the release date as the third quarter of 2010. This seems a bit odd, unless they mean fiscal quarter. Even then… too soon?

They then say that the release date would be on the same day for all countries worldwide. That just sounds fishy, doesn’t it?

Now, here’s the most interesting and perhaps least believable part of the entire rumor: “A scheme will be available in which it is possible to trade in the original Wii for a cheaper price on the new Wii 2.”

No one in the history of this business has ever done such a thing (retail notwithstanding), and I don’t see why Nintendo would suddenly be compelled to do so now. You can’t even trade in an older model of DS for a discount on a newer one unless you take it to GameStop; these are video game consoles, not automobiles.

Granted, the idea sounds nice, no argument there, but unrealistic.

Maxconsole goes on to say that Nintendo wants to hold off on the announcement, which would be made worldwide only one month before release. Given the recent DSi XL announcement and timetable, I’m not sure what to make of that. It fits Japan, but the whole world?

One would assume that retailers and developers would know about it far in advance of the release date, so they can place orders and develop software, respectively. Still, practically dropping a new system in consumers’ laps unexpectedly seems ill-advised, and might even hurt early sales.

Maxconsole adds that “huge publicity” and viral marketing would be employed to create the buzz beforehand. “Official pictures are not yet available, and more specs will be released in due course.”

They add that the reason they believe this is “Artik from Logic-Sunrise.com has regularly provided news to MaxConsole and has a lot of ‘insider’ contacts.” I guess we’ll see, though I would imagine a lot of the above would be subject to change, if any of it were true.

They also note, “Nintendo has suggested that it’s time they embraced high definition technology for the Wii and Blu-ray has firmly established itself. So a Wii 2 with Blu-ray support does make sense.”

Maybe, but let’s face it: Nintendo doesn’t always follow what seems obvious and like it would make the most sense. Otherwise, we would probably have a Game Boy Virtual Console to supplement DSiWare by now.

I don’t know, the story just doesn’t seem to add up to me. It feels too… abrupt. Almost convenient, in so much as it can’t really be proven or disproven until it does or doesn’t happen.

If it were merely a different iteration of the same hardware, such as the different versions of the DS, it would be more believable, but the Blu-ray seems like it would throw that all out of whack; I would imagine developers would almost flock to that, leaving Wii 1.0 owners out in the cold– something that doesn’t happen with different DS iterations (no, not being able to play your Game Boy Advance games on DSi doesn’t count).

Oh well, it’s only a year (or less, depending on whether “third quarter” means fiscal or not) until we find out for sure. And by then, we’ll probably have all but forgotten about this.