Nintendo: We must 'differentiate' to survive against smartphones, tablets

[happydolphin]

thekitchensink said:

BasilZero said:
A potential way to beat/compete that would be to release similar games (the third party indie titles that get released on mobiles) for a cheaper/similar price and through their eShop.

Add that and the first party titles and the console/portable third party developers, and you see a pretty good collection of games that would go up against iOS/android.

Going a 'similar but cheaper' route against your competition is never a good business plan.  If you start beating them, all they have to do is drop their price and you are either immediately screwed or forced into a pricing war where you will be eventually screwed.  A lower price is great, but you need something that truly differentiates you.

But what Iwata is saying is a little strange to me.  After all, the DS sold admirably after iPhone became popular, and iPhone spanked the DS in terms of features.  It was the quality of the games that continued to sell the DS after this point, not the fact that it had a touchscreen.

Yeah. The touchscreen definitely helped highlight certain aspects of a game's usability as well as its quality, so HW features played a little role in lifting up the pre-existing quality of the Nintendo games.

I think what Iwata is saying is that certain formulas that worked on the DS will no longer be viable on a regular console SW pricing model. Examples of these are the touch series games in general which offer pick-up-and-play experiences, many of these being replicated on the mobile devices at lower prices. So those games probably won't work as well. Nintendogs released on the 3DS with little success, the next experiment is Brain Training deamon (or whatever it's gonna be called). Hopefully it sells well, but the whole touch phenomenon is not looking extremely promising for Nintendo at this point, it's good that Nintendo is not resting on that to succeed, or so this quote would lead us to believe.