Ubisoft: NX will bring casual players back to the industry

What will the NX be? We don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a direct rival for the PS4 or Xbox One.

Speaking to investors last night, GameSpot reports that Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said: "On the NX, what we have seen is really great. We think having a new machine coming is going to help the industry to continue to grow and to take a lot more casual players back to the industry."

The comments echo those made by Ubisoft’s EMEA boss Alain Corre to MCV last month.

We have always appreciated the relationship with Nintendo, the co-creation and the fact that they are really concentrating on quality – they have fantastic brands,” he said at E3. And they are addressing the family market in a very different way, their own way, which we appreciate.

We have done a lot of products and successes with Nintendo in the past, and we believe that the NX will recapture a lot the lapsed Wii players. So we will see when they release it, but we are confident.”

NX is due out in March. When will we finally get to see what Nintendo has got planned? And whatever it is, can it really hope to make as big an impact on the wider market as mobile smash-hit Pokemon Go? Does Nintendo’s smartphone success even mean it has to?