Nintendo, as you might expect, is approaching things a bit differently. President Satoru Iwata freely admits the company is already working on the Wii’s successor (something Microsoft’s Shane Kim refuses to concede). However, he adds that he doesn’t view the hardware as particularly interesting.

“We are always preparing for the next hardware,” Iwata says. “We are under development. … But the hardware is a kind of box that consumers reluctantly buy in order to play our games.”

To that end, Nintendo will keep its development well under wraps until Wii sales dry up–in other words, not anytime soon–and developers run out of ways to utilize the system’s interface (ditto).

Nintendo, though, is in an unusual position. With the company’s huge success with the current-generation console, consumers are going to expect a lot from it whenever the successor to the Wii is unveiled.

“Every hardware needs some revolutionary features,” Iwata says. “This time around, it happened to be we had a revolutionary user interface. Will it be the same for the next generation? I really can’t tell.