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Soundwave on 19 March 2015
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

I'm just reciting what Iwata said. 

He said devaluing IP in reference to the mobile games being of poor quality and being ports of existing games (which would lead to a poor experience since button based games don't always translate well to mobile). 

He said ALL Nintendo IP are on the table for smart devices. 

I think Nintendo reviewed the issue you are talking about ... the fact that having Mario/Zelda/Pokemon/etc. games on mobile platforms would erode the handheld market, and I think they simply got to a point where the reward simply outweighed the risk, that is the potential amount of money that they can earn from mobile is enormous. 

The people who really want dedicated handhelds will buy one anyway, I imagine is Nintendo's feeling. The people who were going to ditch those devices for smartphones were going to do so anyway and nothing Nintendo was doing with the 3DS was stopping it. So I think given that Nintendo simply made choice here ... it's better to still make money off those people than lose them entirely (and also be walled off from a new generation of kids entirely). 

And honestly they may very well be right. It's not like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy games stopped selling on the 3DS even though "real" FF and DQ games are available on iOS. Monster Hunter is on iOS too ... and it's "real" Monster Hunter, not some little mini-game title. Monster Hunter still sells fine on the 3DS. The market for dedicated portables may indeed decline in the next 4-5 years ... but it was going to do that likely no matter what Nintendo did. At least this way they'll be making money one way or another. 

Like I said, Nintendo's goal with this move is to grow the sales of their dedicated game hardware. They aren't throwing in the towel and accept a shrinking market for their hardware like you believe. That's why Nintendo won't shift the gameplay styles of their games onto smartphones like you anticipate. Square-Enix and Capcom are third party publishers, so they don't care much about which platforms their games sell on. Nintendo, however, wants to sell their own hardware. Making mobile games is about raising awareness for their IPs, not replacing what was previously potentially their handheld market.

Iwata：

While this is not something directly relating to the collaboration that we have announced today, here is one thing I would like to mention to avoid any misunderstandings.

Nintendo has decided to deploy its video game business on smart devices but it is not because we have lost passion or vision for the business of dedicated video game systems. On the contrary, now that we have decided how we will make use of smart devices, we have come to hold an even stronger passion and vision for the dedicated video game system business than ever before. Nintendo has made this decision because we have concluded that the approach of making use of smart devices is a rational way for us to encourage even more people around the world to recognize the great value of the wonderful game software available on our dedicated game systems.

People aren't going to recognize the software on dedicated hardware as great value when they can have the same thing for a fraction of the price. So that's a clear "no" to a full Zelda adventure on smartphones.


I think you're wrong and we'll see. 

I think one of the best ways to grow the brand is to have some 8/9-year-old kid who wouldn't have otherwise played Zelda at all this gen, get hooked on a Phantom Hourglass type Zelda F2P game on iOS. Start with 1-2 dungeons, then he/she can download others and voila, now they kinda know the rudimentary basics of the Zelda franchise (Link does a spin-attack, oh the dungeons are like puzzles you have to figure them out, neat, oh a lizard boss), etc.

You know Zelda, you think it's great, but how the hell is a 8-11 year old today supposed to know that? Some of these kids weren't even born when the DS/Wii launched, lol. 

And maybe just maybe some of those kids will then say "y'know Zelda is cool, oh awesome they have Zelda on NX and it's like super epic I'm checking this out". And maybe they won't, but I think Nintendo is willing to let it ride and take that risk. 

And again even for third parties, I'm sure Capcom is heavily invested in Monster Hunter selling well on the 3DS. The iOS version has done nothing to stop that. 

At the end of the day too hardware only exists to serve Nintendo, you seem to have the opposite view that Nintendo exists to serve hardware. Hardware is not supposed to prevent you from reaching your audience, the moment it starts doing that is the moment it becomes a liability, not an asset.