Nintendo promised back in 2012 Wii U games making use of two GamePads would be released “sometime next year.” Well it's being two years now, and according to Shigeru Miyamoto, dual gamepad won't be coming anytime soon.
“We’ll make that available as an additional accessory when there’s content to support it,” said NoA’s senior product marketing manager Bill Trinen.
“Certainly as we’ve been working on Wii U, I think we’re at a point where we don’t feel it’s realistic to expect people to purchase two GamePads yet,” Miyamoto told IGN. “We’re still trying to get as many people as possible to buy the system itself, and that’s where our focus is right now.
“For the time being, two GamePad gameplay is not within our objectives in the short-term. From a technical standpoint, I think if we decided to pursue that, technically we would be able to and we can perform system updates that would allow for that.”
At present and for the foreseeable future, co-op and multiplayer games will continue to be played using a WiiMote and Nunchuck.
“It’s very interesting from a gameplay perspective because there are a lot of possibilities,” he said. “But, at the same time, taking that kind of approach would be a drain on resources and require us to continue to utilize our development resources for that.
“So then it would become a question of where do we want to devote our resources: Is it to creating regular GamePad games, or creating games centered around two GamePads?”