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Asriel on 17 March 2015
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Mummelmann said:
outlawauron said:
It's been a long time coming, so some backlash was expecting as many didn't want to think Nintendo would do work for mobile platforms.


Basically; the nerds (people like us) were saying "no, no and no" and the business world was saying "yes, yes and yes", Nintendo seems to have woken up and realized that they are in this to make money, not only pursue their own creative interests, this is a fact that most developers and publishers in the world have had to deal with for a long time. The more I think about it, the more happy I am about the whole thing, an added bonus could be that Nintendo helps lift the quality of mobile gaming and perhaps even helps battle some of the more unsavory business practices this arena is currently hosting.

We'll see, I guess.

I will point out that as of January 2014, Iwata said that Nintendo would explore developing on smartphones; he only ever ruled out stuff like smart-device only, or dumping existing/past Nintendo titles onto smart-devices for a quick buck. Last April alongside the news about QoL and the new direction for future hardware, Iwata confirmed Nintendo staff had been given the express goal of experimenting on smart devices. Iwata's caution came less from not wanting to use smart-devices, and more from not wanting to devalue Nintendo's intellectual property. He correctly argued at GDC 2011 that content is king, that videogames have value and that value needs protecting from a race-to-the-bottom. A race to the bottom is exactly what has ensued in the smart-device software market.

Now I'm mainly replying to you because I really agree with the latter part of your post, and I'm hoping (going by past statements like I've outlined above) Nintendo will begin a process of rectifying this, as you say in the bolded part of your post. Too many consumers--particularly in the West where app spending is far below levels per user than Japan, for example--don't see value in videogames; videogames have become disposable and this threatens the console industry in the long-run. Rather than ignoring the smart-device market, as Nintendo initially seemed to want to, the better thing to do is to engage with it and engage with the hundreds of millions of consumers who regularly game on smart devices but not on console. If Nintendo can start to bring some of them into the industry, while creating a higher quality standard of mobile title, the games industry could be in a much better place.

There's some strength in comparing this to Nintendo's entry into the home console market way back in the 80's. Atari and other companies choked the market with masses of low-quality software; Nintendo responded with a select number of quality titles and the market responded.