Soleron said:
Nintendo's market space should be quality titles, not high-budget titles. No one has made a game as polished as 2D Mario or Zelda or Metroid in their genres except Nintendo themselves. All the "App Store" developers out there and a HUGE market wanting sequels to these titles but no one steps up. Nintendo would only have to put ~10 people on a 2D sequel to the above for the 3DS, but they'd be very experienced people with clear goals. Something Rovio or whoever couldn't match. Because I don't see them doing it. Would cost maybe a million dollars at a stretch, which is nothing given it would get 10m sales easy. Even if it was a clone title without the brand recognition I see it selling 2-3m on the iPhone. |
So the question is whether Nintendo can sell over 100 million handhelds to people who are largely only interested in buying Nintendo developed games.
Personally, I don't think the Nintendo exclusive market is that large.
The irony is that the big complaint a lot of gamers have with platforms like the DS or Wii is that they are flooded with lower quality 3rd party titles, but the reality is that having these titles is a part of what makes Nintendo's business function so successfully the way it has in the current generation. Nintendo gets their licensing fee whether a game is "bad" or not. If publishers of these games migrate over to smart phone platforms (bypassing production and distribution costs), which is largely where the mainstream mobile market is shifting, Nintendo won't have that business and more importantly, won't have any growth. There is a ceiling for the 1st party Nintendo game market whether anyone chooses to see it that way or not.
The secret to the DS success has not been "quality" despite the fact that it has received some of the best quality portable games of its generation; it has always been sheer volume of developer support, often in the form of budget games. That is to say the same budget games that can be published on non dedicated gaming platforms.
