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happydolphin on 04 March 2012
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HappySqurriel said:
happydolphin said:
HappySqurriel said:


They are huge, but so are PC sales numbers; and similar to PC sales numbers there is a lot of people who own multiple-computers, replace them far more regularly than people buy videogame consoles, and the vast majority of PCs are sold for uses other than playing games. There is an order of magnitude more PCs on the market than videogame consoles, and yet there are several times as many complicated games sold for consoles; and we (probably) have a very similar situation between tablets and smartphones and portable gaming systems.

@bold. The issue keyword with that argument is complicated. We're talking about extremely cheap and easy to pick up games such as Farmville and Angrybirds.

So, the situation is very different since the appeal of very cheap PC games has only increased as of late. Flash games have been around since around 2000, before that it was all shareware, which mostly PC enthusiasts were aware of and touched, but they prefered their complicated counterparts.

The truth is, the landscape of small affordable and entertaining games and their use on PC's, smartphones and tablets has radically changed in the last 4 years, mostly due to Facebook and Apple.

The threat exists.

Ultimately if the trend continues, gamers may conclude "I have all I need on my smartphone/tablet/facebook", hence the need to anticipate.

Of course happyS I don't advocate that Nintendo's current strategy is without value. I am psyched about the WiiU and fervently believe in it. But for applications such as Nintendogs and Brain Age, which were explosively bread and butter for Nintendo gen 7, may find a very real threat...

If I were them I would mitigate.

 


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bejeweled

"Bejeweled is a tile-matching puzzle video game by PopCap Games, first developed for browsers in 2001. Three follow-ups to this game have been released. More than 75 million copies of Bejeweled have been sold, and the game has been downloaded more than 500 million times"

It isn't new at all ...

Since the early 2000s there has been amazing interest in these kinds of simple games, and all that changed with the iPhone was people found a reliable way to charge small sums of money for them; rather than for these companies to pay for them through banner-ads or by charging far more for PC downloads. They have failed to have much of an impact on the "core" game market primarily because they are not in direct competition with it.

Much like how the growth of youtube isn't killing the motion picture industry, and twitter isn't killing newspapers, the iphone is not killing Nintendo; the companies may be struggling at the same time as these other companies are becomming popular, but the core of their problems are elsewhere. If the iPhone was really having an impact on Nintendo's handhelds why is the 3DS the fastest selling dedicated gaming device ever sold? Certainly, it struggled out of the gate but that had far more to do with Nintendo selling it at a very high price; not that the iPhone existed.

I do agree that the market is still there, but I don't agree that these alternate platforms don't pose a risk to the long-term strategy Nintendo holds.

Probably one of the reasons why the Music and Video sectors are doing so well despite youtube are because of circumstance, where a few companies jumped into the Netosphere offering services such as iTunes and NetFlix. Without these the sectors may have been suffering much more.

Add to that the fact that youtube only sports 10min movies, most people prefer the full lenth feature, and prefer purchasing it.

@bejeweled. These games existed of course since 2000, I mentioned that. But with the iPod Touch a whole new series of much higher graphical quality emerged (Flight Control), and games like Bejewelled also benefitted from Apples' marketing measures (app store).