Android and the Iphone are a threat to Sony and Nintendo good reason why !

[Impulsivity]

mai said:

mrstickball said:

I would compare it to retail store revenue vs. Wal-Mart and the other big-box retailers. There was always huge amounts of money in retail for many years. However, it was always distributed between hundreds of thousands of smaller retailers, which couldn't offer discounts or a large range of goods. Enter Wal-Mart, Target, Meijer and CostCo (and the rest). They de-balkanized the market. The money was still there and growing, but the earnings amalgamated into fewer stores....Which meant that those that sold products through said stores would earn more money, and raise gross revenue.

Then I'd compare smartphones to PCs, what they essentially are. Does this mean 'de-balkanized' PC market is automatically pose a threat to home console business?

mrstickball said:

Don't you consider that a threat to the DS's future lineup of games?

Not at all. 3DS future lineup is solely depends on Nintendo own efforts, none of 3rd party titles ever entered top-10, very few cracked top-20 of DS game library. Why should I?

  One interesting question is whether for handhelds Nintendo would make more or less profit by making Nintendo games for mobiles instead of releasing portable platforms (ala SEGA).  My guess would be less short term, but more long term (as in 5 years from now when the non phone handheld market collapses as phones become vastly more capable and cheaper)

  The day you don't have to buy the crappy Nintendo hardware to play the high quality Nintendo games will be a good one (Nintendo is ALWAYS behind the times on hardware, remember the black and white gameboy vs gamegear?  Wii vs PS3?  cartridge based N64 vs all the CD systems?  DS with N64 graphics vs the PSP and iphone with next gen quality graphics etc).

   Thank god for competition or we'd still be playing games with 16 bit graphics on consoles and be barely introducing color to the gameboy line these days in a Nintendo only world.