So with Nintendo delivering a deadly blow to Sony's handheld market in Japan with Monster Hunter. I have been thinking Nintendo and Sony have attacked each other and fought over the Japanese and global games markets for over a decade. Each time the two companies find a weakness to exploit and a way to make their product more capable of competing against their competitors.

But the general consensus is , Sony is no longer the enemy Nintendo has to worry about. In fact Sony sees Nintendo's success as important to its own survival in the handheld market saying a huge loss to 3DS would send investors and gamers the message that handheld gaming devices are a thing of the past and smart phones are the future. So is hurting Vita going to help Nintendo at all in the long run? If Vita goes down wouldn't the same thing Sony's worried about happen to Nintendo? If Vita gets destroyed and 3DS doesn't do amazing consumers and investors get the idea that the days of handheld consoles is over.

So what can be done to hurt Apple? Nintendo needs to do something that can make it capable of competing with Apple in not only the short run but the long run.

Fact is Nintendo is pitting a games only handheld device up against a phone. Everybody needs a phone and not everybody needs a gaming device. So while Apple could steal developer support away from Nintendo which would do a lot of damage to Nintendo and drive hardware sales down. Nintendo couldn't do the same to Apple, even if Nintendo secured all of the major iOS exclusives it wouldn't do shit to Apple. The I-Phone will sell with or without those games, but Nintendo's hardware will not.

Now suggested ways of damaging Apple have been suggested by Sony. Sony launched the Xperia Play in hopes to steal some market share from I-Phone. Then Sony announced they will be releasing two tablets in hopes that these tablets can do damage to Apple's I-Pad business which accounts for a huge amount of Apple's profits. Sony's latest move to damage Apple was to announce PlayStation Suite will launch on all Sony mobile devices as well as on Android devices in hopes that Playstation Suite will deal out a serious blow to iOS and in turn Apple.

But I have brought this up several times, should Nintendo follow Sony and go on the offensive against Apple. Should Nintendo release a gaming phone or a tablet? Should Nintendo sign an alliance with Google and work with Android to damage Apple's dominance in the smart phone industry.

However every time I suggest Nintendo expand out of the gaming dedicated console market I hear a resounding no. Every single fan on VGChartz pretty much has stated Nintendo should not enter the tablet or cell phone market.

So the question is without Nintendo exiting the gaming exclusive market how do they protect themselves from Apple let alone go on the offensive?

What can Nintendo do to drive Apple's sales down? Don't think Apple is a threat listen to Iwata's keynotes in the past year or two. Iwata states the biggest threat to the games industry is cheap 99cent iOS games. Both Reggie and Iwata have gone on the record hinting that they now consider Apple to be their biggest competitor.

Apple employees and game industry exec's have recently even suggested Apple will dominate the games industry within 10 years. Steve Jobs took a poke at Nintendo's DS success pointing to how fast iOS software was able to eclipse Nintendo's. In fact software on iOS devices were so high that they had passed both DS and PSP's combined. Jobs pointed to this as a fact to support Apple's dominance over the gaming industry. In fact 120-million iOS devices had been sold at the time falling only 5-million short of beating Nintendo's DS.

So with Apple poised to be Nintendo's next competitor, how can Nintendo adapt to attack this new menace?

easy, patent buttons.

Nintendo will in no way be able to be a viable threat to, let alone beat Apple. Apple is the biggest company on the planet and far, far bigger and more influential than Nintendo ever will be.

However. Nintendo have been around since 1889 and have been extremely profitable almost all those years. They will always have a loyal fanbase and games like Mario and Pokemon which willremain cashcows. They don't have to beat Apple to be and remain hugely successful as a company.

Also, we should at least give the new guy (forgot his name) a chance to royally screw up Apple before we hand over that responsibility to its competitors

The thing is, people have always needed phones and handheld consoles have done fine in the past. Just because phones can now play small 99p games on the go doesn't mean that the market for real handheld gaming has disappeared.

FFS, why all this obsession with the mobile market? Sure it's gonna take away some people, but people treat this stuff too seriously. "Drive Apples sales down"? What are you talking about? They can't. People don't buy apple hardware for games, they are an addition to everything else that the iOS hardware offers. Nintendo can't do anything but try and increase sales of their own hardware.

They need to do their own thing and bring games for every audience. The DS owes its success to exactly that. GAMES GAMES GAMES sell stuff. This holiday should solidify that fact, once and for all.

I think this is a dangerous mentality. Nintendo seemingly ignored the PSP when they built the 3DS (the PSP was constantly bashed for not having a second analogue stick), and are now paying the price. The Vita is getting a lot of attention from developers, and Nintendo should not be satisfied simply by having Monster Hunter 4. Lots of people play MH on their PSPs, and MH3rd is coming to the Vita.

Nintendo should not ignore Sony in this.

They need a very unique device. I personally don't think the 3DS is the right answer, because it's too much like the DSi, the Vita and many of the smartphones we have available.

The iPhone can play a lot of games the 3DS can, even if it won't be quite as good a fit for it as it would for the 3DS. Combined with Nintendo's lack of acknowledgement of  99 cent games as a "valid" form of games, the 3DS really isn't in a great shape to hold the iPhone at bay.

Nintendo would need hardware that is radically different from current portable devices if they want to trump the iPhone. The question is of course if they even need that. They can still be succesful based on selling their own IPs, even if the success won't be at the level of the DS. 

Well while Sony should definitely not be ignored because they still have the potential to steal market share. As a threat to Nintendo's handheld existence they are no longer the biggest threat. In fact Sony even recently acknowledged that a failure of 3DS would hurt Sony's Vita and the handheld industries ability to survive. I share that sentiment as well as the idea that a Vita failure would severely damage Nintendo's handheld capabilities as well. The two competitors need each other to survive its in their best interest that each other remain around.

As for MH3 coming to Vita, your a writer here so I'm guessing you must have some knowledge the general public does not. Because I have not heard anything official from Capcom or Sony to indicate MH3 is coming to Vita in any shape or form. The only indication I have heard of is that a retailer leaked an inventory list which slates MonsterHunter3 for Vita. As far as I know the Monster Hunter Portable 3rd came out for PSP and came to PS3, but I have yet to see any official confirmation that it or MH3 is coming to Vita. So a source of that info would be enlightenning. Unless you are refering to the fact that Vita can download MHP:3rd through backwards compatability.

I agree currently 3DS is in no position to hold off Apple. As for those saying Nintendo doesn't need to go on the offensive or worry about Apple because there will always be a market for Nintendo's software. Well look at GameCube look how great that did with just Nintendo's software, yes it was profitable but Nintendo was loosing share contantly with every new console. Nintendo's software was not able to keep Nintendo's home consoles from being in a steady decline in sales ever since the NES. If Nintendo's handheld division began to steadily decline in user base every generation, Nintendo would be boned.

Nintendo cannot afford to decline drastically. Lets look at Nintendo's first party software support at best Nintendo has about 30+ million loyal consumers judging by the fact that despite having the highest selling hardware on the market Nintendo titles themselves don't sell any better then 26-million.

So say Nintendo looses all of those gamers buying games other then Nintendo's first party titles. Nintendo will be down to at best 40-million in hardware sales. Well that loss will mean less games for Nintendo's handhelds and if Nintendo's home division isn't making a killing it will mean all gains will be spread between handheld and home platforms.

With Nintendo incapable of releasing as many first party titles the hardware sales will continue to decline each generation. Apple will slowly eat up market share and so will Android. Now Nintendo has 13.5 billion in the bank so they could sustain steady losses for a very long time. But would they?

Of course my numbers are based on speculation based around VGChartz data. But Nintendo loosing profit steadily from smart phones is definitely not going to be good. If Nintendo is incapable of fighting back then all they can do is wait until Smart Phones kill them, which is inevitable if they cannot do anything to increase sales of hardware.

Nintendo needs to be able to fight back, the question is how can a dedicated video game handheld do anything to a smart phone. Also the idea that people have always needed phones and Nintendo has always survived so they are no threat now. Well phones back in 2004 when DS launched were incapable of playing games that DS had. In fact smart phones have only become capable of playing Nintendo's software within the past two to three years. As phones become more and more powerful and can play better and better games Nintendo will no doubt loose market share.

The industry is changing and smart phones like it or not are a huge threat to Nintendo's handheld dominance or even their long term survival!

Just finished reading your post, and I must say, what a load of nonsense. It's partially make-belief, and partially history revisionism.

This whole thing works under the assumption that smartphones and handheld game consoles compete with each other directly. They don't. Smartphones are handheld computers. handheld game consoles are portable videogame consoles. Now, PC's don't compete directly with game consoles.  This was shown with the NES and the Wii more recently. So if we extend that to the handheld space, it's very clear that smartphones and handhelds don't compete with each other, so apple selling that much more phones and tablets has no effect on the DS, 3DS, PSP or Vita. 3DS selling like crap was/will be? entirely Nintendo's own fault.

So no, smartphones aren't a huge threat to Nintendo.

Oh, and going back to your original post, it's funny reading about Steve Jobs making a stab at Nintendo, considering he failed twice to succeed in the videogame marketplace, once with the Mac computers, and now with the iphone and ipad.

@ MH3 - I was certain MH3G HD was confirmed for the Vita, but I guess not. My bad.

Anyway, I certainly agree that Nintendo loosing marketshare is a bad thing for them, but in Nintendo's current situation, what's really the best they can do? We both agree the 3DS (in its current form at least), is not what Nintendo needs to make sure gamers will want a dedicated handheld over a smartphone.

So either Nintendo needs to do something drastic to make the 3DS a more compelling choice (in terms of hardware at least), and I don't think a second analogue stick is the definitive answer. The 3DS's weaknesses as I see it:

1) Downloadable games are a small niche on the device. There is no comprehensive infrastructure to give freedom to developers and publishers in this field.

2) The hardware lacks killer features. It does very little that hasn't been done before or improved on before.

If Nintendo doesn't do anything about those two, then I don't think they will be able to match the success of the DS. Software will of course play a huge part in all of this, and no doubt the 3DS can be a huge success regardless of its hardware so long as the software is there. But if Nintendo wants to avoid losing marketshare to Apple, they need something more. I think the best solution to those problems would be a new hardware platform, but that would also be a huge mistake. So Nintendo's best hope might be to ride this one out for a couple of years, before they take the fight to the phones.