Will Sony and MS have the courage to compete with Nintendo in 2016?

[bowserthedog]

padib said:

Conina said:

I doubt that very much. Revenue of mobile apps (main share: mobile games) is climbing fast each year.

• iOS app revenue 2012 = ~5 billion US$
• iOS app revenue 2013 = over 10 billion US$
• iOS app 2014 = over 3 billion US$ each quarter, probably 13 - 15 billion US$ for the whole year.
• app revenue in the Google play store is growing even faster, together they will top $20 billion US$ this year
• gamepad-extensions and similar solutions for iOS and Android get better and cheaper each month

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/01/07App-Store-Sales-Top-10-Billion-in-2013.html

I'm loving the graphs. Here are my thoughts.

Firstly, the curves seem to be plateauing in the next 5 years. The trend is already bending downwards on the right graph, and slightly bending downwards on the left trend.

Secondly, I was talking with a friend about a F2P game called Gods of War or something like that. It's something like clash of clans. This guy has been playing this game for almost a year, he's dirt poor and alredy spent 250$ on it. Apparently some of his noob friends already spent up to 1000$ on in-game purchases and they are not even in the top clans of their kingdom, far from it. So my point is that these numbers don't necessarily translate into software sales, and we do not know if these sales would have been sooner spent on Nintendo games.

So there you have it, just my two cents on that.

But in the end, other than concluding that Nintendo should cave in and make games on smartphones, what do these graphs show? Also, if the twins are largely unaffected by this data, why should we conclude that the portable line will be any further hindered than it already has been?

The problem with mobile revenues is that it is spread out to many many games. Kind of a wii like situation. There isn't justification for largescale games moving to the platform. But there is justification for smaller games and lots of them.  To put it into perspective we get more tv show episodes than big budget movies and people watch more tv episodes by far than movies. But that doesn't change the fact that movies are still a thriving business. And with the twins growing versus last gen all signs point towards a healthy and robust large scale game economic environment.  One day mobile may be able to enter into the console space but that will come from actually creating consoles at which point what's the difference? They are now low end consoles. We already see many android consoles but they seem to be failing.  Apple could gain traction by putting power into apple tv and bundling with a controller. Would love to see it happen. More competition for cross platform games the more Nintendo stands out with its' exclusives. What will end up happing with android consoles, an apple consoles and steam box is that Sony and Microsoft will become more watered down as cross platform games are not playable in so many ways and Nintendo ends up the big winner with it's exclusive content.