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Gamerace on 03 August 2013
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RolStoppable said:
Gamerace said:

Those games are already on iOS/Android - for free.  There's no greater price discrepency than that.   Ignoring it doesn't change the fact.  Clearly people want to play those classic titles still.  Many are very well suited to mobile devices and it's money that's Nintendo is leaving on the table.

Whether Nintendo officially puts them on mobile or not people are playing them on mobile.  But I'm sure a good chunk of those people would gladly pay $.99 or $1.99 to play them if they had that option.   As long as Nintendo isn't putting current games on mobile, it's not competing with WiiU/3DS.

If that causes a price discrepancy between mobile on what they are changing on their own systems, then clearly, they are charging too much.   If they want higher prices then add something (hd, new levels) to justify the price and sell those exclusively on WiiU/3DS.  

Let's run some numbers while we completely ignore the possibility that making Nintendo games available on other platforms could undermine the sales potential of Nintendo hardware.

To test the waters, Nintendo puts their NES library on smartphones for $1 a piece. Let's say they are able to shift 100m copies annually, that generates revenue of $100m of which 30% move to the platform holder, thus Nintendo is left with $70m. Now Nintendo either has the choice to decrease the revenue for NES games on their own platforms to one fifth of what it is now or use development resources to justify a $5 price tag. Either way, Nintendo loses out on money. Dropping the price to $1 for NES games is self-explanatory, justifying the $5 price tag means that those developers can't work on new games. So the already meager gain of $70m from smartphones will be mostly offset.

People are already playing these games on those platforms so Nintendo isn't suddenly making them available, they are making them available at cost instead of free.

Okay by your numbers Nintendo has made 70m but now has to drop the price on eshop.  Let's assume they sell 1m on eshop (we both know those numbers are not happening but we'll use this for estimating loss to be conservative).  So now they loss $4 on ever one sold through eshop or 4m dollars. 

Um?  Am I missing something?  70m gain on mobile at a cost of a 4m loss on eshop?  HELL YES!  DO it Nintendo!