Well I already play SNES Mario games on my phone :P

Quoted for truth. Nintendo sells hardware AND software, though makes most of its profits from hardware/accessories.

No mobile mario game, that would ruin mario games and they would probably be dumbed down to apply to a mobile audience

Don't expect anyone to bother lol.

#emulator

Actually they make far more through software sales... but without the dedicated hardware through which to push their software, they probably wouldn't make nearly as much because there's no way you could justify price points of $50-$60 per games on smart phones / tablets and other devices.

Nintendo's current business model is fine, as long as they understand that there are hundreds of millions of people who are now playing games who have never played a Nintendo before, due to owning a smartphone or tablet, and swishing their finger to Google Play and downloading Temple Run or Angry Birds. The giant segment of consumers who began their gaming on tablets/ smartphones in 2008 through today is an entire generation of players that didn't grow up with Mario, Zelda, or Pokemon, and therefore Nintendo's only competitive advantage of having the best first-party brands in the industry loses it's importance.

In the end, if most people playing videogames today have never played Mario before, because they've only ever played on touch devices, Nintendo has absolutely no competitive advantage whatsoever. That's an entire generation of gamers who've never heard of all these first-party brands that Nintendo thinks will lure people into buying dedicated machines for the rest of time. I just don't think Nintendo has a safe business model in the long-term. They are losing the popularity contest by a long shot.

Nintendo should put their entire Game Boy line of software on smartphones, for $1.99 each, make hundreds of millions, and that gives them two options for future purchasers of hardware. A) People with no knowledge of Nintendo games would now all of a sudden have access to a huge library that would introduce them to what they've been missing out on. B) Many of those people would love what they'd see so much so that they'd go online to see what kinds of new Nintendo games there are, and they'd be more likely to know what a 3DS or Wii U is, and therefore be more likely to buy a dedicated machine to play new Nintendo software on.

Simply going along as they have been since 1985 and not acknowledging that the world has changed and the industry has been turned upside down is not going to work for them. Right now they are speaking only to a continually shrinking audience of people. Sony has similar problems, but at least they have Playstation Mobile and Xperia phones. That helps somewhat.

It's complicated... software is higher margin but lower revenue.  Hardware is lower margin but higher revenue.  For a company like Nintendo that exclusively relies on video game hardware and software, for them to be profitable they have to make money off of both, otherwise what revenue they are earning on the games is canceled out because they're taking a loss on hardware sold.  Ideally, for Nintendo, they need to make profit from both, otherwise they are in trouble.

He's correct, but he highlights the real meat of the challenge. The burden is absolutely 100% on console developers to make sure their games remain worthy of full-price. Declining quality along with the new monetization methods are what killed the music industry and what is slowly strangling the movie industry (although movies will always have the threatre as a social experience to fall back on, likewise music with concert tours and such).

Part of the reason Mario games are so great is because Nintendo uses them to make the most of hardware that they know better than anybody. If they shrank Mario to a 99-cent value for a foreign platform . . . it just wouldn't be the same.

Thank god