| RolStoppable said: Enton gets it. Well, I am not sure if this really is that acquisition, but whatever. Anyway, if people's lives change and the smartphone supplants the TV as the most important device, then the marketing efforts must shift accordingly. |
From what we know, it seems like this ought to be that acquisition. The price is right. Last January during the Q&A Iwata was asked, "Just focusing on the fourth quarter (January-March 2014), [R&D expenses] will increase about 80% compared with the same period last fiscal year. Do you expect to continue to see similar expenses next fiscal year, or is it a temporary increase?" He answered, "We decided to increase our forecasted expenses this fiscal year in order to tackle some of the areas that we feel we are not strong at, and this is an investment toward the future." That aligns with DeNA helping them develop their new online network, and it would of course be a one-time expense toward that aim.
I can't imagine what else that acquisition could have been, although of course it's possible they invested over $100 million in another company within the past year. Something that makes me suspicious is the mobile app Nintendo released last May in partnership with Dokomo. I don't know if Dokomo and DeNA are competitors, but if they are that would seem weird to me.
There are some slight changes in the rhetoric since last year -- in 2014 the goal of Nintendo's mobile apps was not to generate profit in the short-term, but to "create consumer awareness." Now we have DeNA running around bragging about how much money they're going to be swimming in. The gist of it (at least from Nintendo) is the same though. Iwata basically announced that Nintendo would be making mobile games last January, he just thickly sugar-coated the message. Literally saying that he set Nintendo developers with the task of creating a mobile app that would promote their other products, that would be entertaining enough to get people hooked on opening it daily, and that he didn't explicitly tell them not to make it a game.
