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noname2200 on 13 January 2011
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Soleron said:
noname2200 said:
Soleron said:

I don't believe mobile phone games will move upmarket. The mobile devlopers don't know how to make a game that appeals to the handheld buyer, nor are they willing to fund games that take over a year to develop. They can't yet get mass appeal like Nintendo's first party games can.


But that's how disruption works: they start out with a crappy product that only sells because there's no alternative, and then improve the quality of their product until it rivals/surpasses the incumbent.  Here, cell phone games ARE by and large utter crap (if they were on the Wii or DS, the enthusiast press would by and large turn their nose up at them), but that's okay because everyone has a cell phone but few people want to lug around a second, bulky device to play games.  Ergo, the crap game sells!

But as time goes on, and more and more crap games come out, someone somewhere is going to try to compete for the market's dollars by coming out with a cell phone game that isn't utter crap.  It may only be "okay," but we all know it doesn't take much to rise to the top of the crap pile that is cell phone gaming.  And if that person succeeds, he will inspire others to step their game up accordingly: many developers will be left behind, but others will rise to the challenge, and now there will be other cell phone games that are "okay."  And thus the cycle will continue to feed on itself.

This process is pretty much inevitable, and Nintendo knows it (hence DSiWare and, most importantly, Street Pass).  There are, of course, a myriad of ways to combat the disruptor.  Let's see if Nintendo finds one of them.


I don't believe there will be a single developer capable of creating the 'average' game you are talking about. There are already some fun games for phones (and PC Flash games) but they haven't shown the ability to:

- Get the selling price above $10-15
- Be the reason people buy the hardware
- Get enough recognition for people to follow their releases and buy games in a franchise
- Actually reduce sales of the next market tier up. Currently they are displacing Flash games and newspaper puzzles

Nintendo has another weapon as well, one that has existed for ages. Why did PC not kill consoles? It was ubiquitous and powerful enough to play console games. It's because developers could target specific hardware with a guaranteed control scheme (i.e. buttons) and specs. Phones are too diverse to overcome that, except the iPhone which is one reason it has done so well. But the interface (touch screen) is poorly suited to games more upmarket than its current ones.

I disagree completely.  To begin with, I think you're too quick to discount the possibility that some developer out there is going to step up big; before Donkey Kong, Nintendo wasn't a particularly special developer, in spite of their being in the market for nearly a decade.  Pokemon is one of the best-selling developers ever, but before Pokemon it spent eight years toiling in mediocrity.  No one remembers Marathon, but everyone knows Halo.  I don't know who's going to be the one to break out, but I'm confident that somebody out there CAN.

Second, I believe you're overlooking the fact that, with cell phones, the great strength isn't that the games are what will get people to buy a specific phone, but rather that the games will be good enough that there won't be any point in buying a game-dedicated device, since there's already quality options on a device that you have with you at all times as it is.  Remember, the idea is to sell games, not hardware; the hardware is just a necessary means to deliver the games!

Next, it is true that they are currently they are primarily displacing flash games and sudoku.  However, you're falling into the same trap that many a disrupted company has fallen prey to.  Videogames are not a stand-alone industry.  They are instead a part of the overall entertainment industry.  The fact that, at the moment, cell phone games are doing more to defeat a separate branch of the entertainment industry should not, and probably does not, offer Nintendo any sense of relief, because videogames are little more than an upmarket segment of the entertainment industry.  As a real-world analogy, think back to railroads and canals:  the latter were made obsolete by the former because they were both in the transportation industry, even though there are many radical differences between them!

Finally, I submit to you that the PC market's downfall has more to do with the public's unwillingness to wrestle with diverse graphics cards and other bottlenecks, rather than because of a diverse control scheme.  There really isn't much diversity in the PC control scheme, nor has there been:  nearly every PC game employs the keyboard and mouse, and before then nearly every PC game used the keyboard.  These are things that every PC had, out of the box.  Admittedly, cell phones may end up having similar issues, since they do have some diversity in their computing power.  But that's the only real caveat I see, hardware-wise, and since getting a new phone is both easier and more common than getting a new PC, I doubt it will pose as large an obstacle.