Nintendo has tried console-handheld connectivity before, as in the case of the largely ill-fated GameCube and GameBoy Advance crossing. Now that the Wii U is preparing for launch, sporting a second screen similar to recent handhelds from Nintendo, the company says it's learned a hard lesson from past experiences, which seems to be making the company hesitant to embrace the idea now.

"We have challenged connectivity on many occasions, and one of the great lessons we have learned is the simple fact that those who own both are much fewer than those who don't own both," Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto told IGN. In other words, the overlap is often too small to allow developers to count on it.

That said, Miyamoto did say they are "thinking of the possibility," as long as it didn't hamper the experience on the Wii U. "So what we decided early on when considering the Wii U design was that we had to make it so that every single purchaser of the Wii U is going to have the same play conditions, the same equipment."

While Nintendo appears hesitant to experiment with connectivity for now, the company has admitted that the 3DS could "technically" serve as a controller for the Wii U, and has promised that connectivity will be "central" to the next Smash Bros game.