Macworld E3 article - Ninty/MS/Sony are "OUT OF TOUCH", "Complacent Swine"

[famousringo]

RolStoppable said:

Khuutra said:

leo-j said:

Cough..

iphone 4 received 600,000 pre orders in the first day.. and there were well over a million people trying to pre order it that same day, but it was so much that there servers broke...

 

apple already holds 20% of the gaming market handheld wise and they aren't even trying..

Now do you meean installbase, revenue, or some other metric? Is it game-specific revenune? How do you determine which i[Brand] holders are part of the "gaming market" versus not?

The figure leo-j mentioned applies to software revenue in the USA (2009). Apple's software revenue rose by 400 % year over year which obviously resulted in them taking a bigger slice of the pie between DS, PSP and i[brand]. This of course ignores whether or not the i[brand] should be considered a direct competitor to those handhelds, it could be argued that the i[brand] is to handhelds what the PC is to consoles and they've been co-existing for a long time now.

Regardless, that's the basis of the "Apple is a real threat to Nintendo" argument. What it willfully ignores is that Nintendo's software revenue remained flat or was slightly up (depending on how you want it to spin), so the rise of gaming on i[brand] didn't hurt Nintendo. Yes, their market share was down by a couple of percent, but revenue is the more important figure here and it has to be considered that it already was the DS's fifth year, a time period when video game systems naturally are in decline (though the DS actually wasn't).

The company that is the loser here is undoubtly Sony (sizeable loss in revenue and market share), but that hardly ever gets mentioned.

Personally, I try to be up-front about that fact. But I don't agree that Apple isn't a threat to Nintendo because the DS hasn't yet been impacted by iOS. Threat implies a potential hazard in the near future, not an actual impact on the present.

My suspicion is that Apple is beating Nintendo to the new users, which is why I'm wondering if Nintendo is working hard to retain DS and PSP users rather than try to reach new users with the 3DS. Really, holding on to DS users and seizing PSP users will be no small achievement (200 million devices!), even if iOS ends up driving most of the growth in handheld gaming for the next few years.