Nintendo puts its sleep-tracker plans to sleep

Remember a little over a year ago when Nintendo announced it was taking some of its focus off of making video games and consoles to develop a "Quality of Life" sensor that monitors your sleep? That was weird, right? Apparently, Nintendo has come to this conclusion too, and the company has officially put the effort on hold.

"In regards to the Quality of Life [device], which was not mentioned in any of today’s questions, we do not have the conviction that the sleep-and-fatigue-themed [device] can enter the phase of actually becoming a product,” Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said during an investors Q&A session (translated by Wired). "We no longer have any plans to release it by the end of March 2016."

The remarks echo similar comments Kimishima made to the Japanese newspaper Asahi (as translated by Kotaku), where he said the sleep-tracker is "not yet at the level of a Nintendo product. If we can release it, we’ll release it. If we can’t, then we’ll examine things further."

Nintendo's problems with the sleep sensor project bring to mind the somewhat similar Wii Vitality Sensor, a device announced in 2009 as a way to incorporate biometric information into game design. Nintendo dropped any mention of the product after a poor reaction to its initial E3 unveiling, though the company didn't confirm that the project was fully dead until 2013.

Though the sleep-tracker project is apparently on hold for now, Nintendo says it "still believe[s] there are things we can do in the general category of Quality of Life," a pivot the company first announced over two years ago. Frankly, we'd be perfectly fine if the company just put that entire field out of mind and put a bit more effort into the NX console, "looking into" virtual reality, or maybe just finishing up that delayed Zelda game.