Nintendo has to do something fast!!!

[jetforcejiminy]

ICStats said:

jetforcejiminy said:

ICStats said:

Nintendo has to do something fast... which is wake up and smell the coffee about the mobile gaming market.

mobile gaming is a bad business model for the same reason that music streaming is good for the spotifys of the world but not for the artists whose work is streamed freely. you take those figures and divide and subdivide them by the number of absolute garbage on the itunes store/google play, and i mean absolute tripe of the worst sort which makes flappy bird look like sophisticated game design, and you have mobile developers getting a vanishingly small cut. the only people who theoretically can make it financially are the very large developers ('large' is a relative term here as most mobile developers are quite small compared to activision, nintendo, etc.)--except that even they are struggling.. zynga is bleeding money under don mattrick and rovio is losing jobs faster than they can vomit out angry birds [insert product here] spin-offs.

this is unsustainable long- or medium- term because the market is so fluid and oversaturated with shovelware. if you thought the wii had a lot of junk software, just browse around the nether regions of the app store and you'll understand. the google- and apple-led techno-utopianism that says that tablets/phones will right every wrong and fix every ailing industry is actually falling apart before our eyes. if anything you should be thankful 'traditional' core gaming is a separate entity from mobile gaming, because today's mobile gaming looks a lot like 1983's console gaming in terms of the excrement to quality software ratio.

Sure the amount of excrement to quality software ratio is massive, but there are lucrative markets.  People in Japan and other places that are commuter heavy, use mobile devices for entertainment on the go.  What used to be DS-land, is now iPhone & Samsung land, and they are playing RPGs & Pokemon type games, usually from bigger publishers.  People are attracted to big names, quality, and whatever their friends are playing.  Nintendo could and I think should get a piece of that.

Zynga & Rovio are hardly comparable to Nintendo.  The former has no great IP and is based on a model of spamware, and Rovio is a single IP one hit wonder.

Wii was full of crapware as well, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a good business for Nintendo to put out it's hits among the crapware and bank big.  It doesn't have to be some perfect nexus of of gaming which will last for an eternity to get into it.  Nintendo should be fast moving; there is an opportunity in mobile now, and mobile is also eating their lunch.  It may pay big for just a few years, or Nintendo can help to define it.  While they sit on the sidelines, they have their own business buried.

i was pointing out two of the 'success stories' of mobile. that is what financial success looks like for a mobile developer. spam, microtransactions and throwing poultry in various themes and guises. oh and massive job losses and perpetual instability. anyway your point about the wii is irrelevant. nintendo were the wii's gatekeepers, that system had as much crap as they allowed; they will hardly be in such a position if they enter they already oversaturated mobile market. sega has done it and is finding very little success--no-one's playing sonic instead of some other endless runner. and ultimately this idea that the cream will naturally rise is just silly. simogo for example makes brilliant mobile games, but they're as culty as, say, platinum when it comes to sales performance.. fact is angry birds and bejewled are the acs and cods of mobile, except not profitable and absolutely unsustainable. (i think down the line the annualization of ac and cod is also unsustainable, but that's a different matter.)