In mid-January, major Japanese news outlet Nikkei reported that Nintendo planned to restructure its hardware divisions for the first time in nearly a decade. In its investor presentation this week, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata confirmed that report.

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"As you might already know from some newspaper reports, we will reorganize our development divisions next month for the first time in nine years," Iwata said during his prepared remarks. "Two divisions which have independently developed handheld devices and home consoles will be united to form the Integrated Research & Development Division, which will be headed by Genyo Takeda, Senior Managing Director."In other words, Nintendo's software development branch, EAD, will be joined by IRD in just a couple weeks.This change in structure also comes at a time when Nintendo is attempting to assess and realign its overall development approach for hardware, which has significant implications for its software as well. "Last year we also started a project to integrate the architecture for our future platforms," Iwata noted. "What we mean by integrating platforms is not integrating handhelds devices and home consoles to make only one machine. What we are aiming at is to integrate the architecture to form a common basis for software development so that we can make software assets more transferable, and operating systems and their build-in applications more portable, regardless of form factor or performance of each platform."Iwata explained one of the results of this new focus and alignment is to "avoid software lineup shortages or software development delays," and that while past different hardware platforms required very different development approaches, times have changed."Although it has not been long since we began to integrate the architecture and this will have no short-term result, we believe that it will provide a great benefit to our platform business in the long run," Iwata concluded. "In order to sustain competitive edges for our platforms, it has become more and more important for us to smoothly transition between platforms which tends to cause a lot of trouble due to the scale and complexity of these transitions."

Rich is an Executive Editor of IGN.com and the leader of IGN's Nintendo team. He also watches over all things WWE, Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed and much more. Follow Rich on Twitter , if you dare!