A Virtual Console app would be huge or a bomb?

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RolStoppable said:

invetedlotus123 said:

But playing traditional games with touchscreen isn't that awful. Less complex controls like Gameboy and Nes can be replicated and with a few tweaks it is good enough. More complex controllers like SNES and N64 would be more challenging, but not impossible. For an example of how traditional games can work well with touchscreen looks for the Sonic ports for Android. I really enjoyed the experience I had with Sonic CD. And I think Nintendo would have a good marketing with thia cheap entry in their framchises. And let's face it, emulation is a reality, and a reality Nintendo can't do much about it. They are waking up to those things, they just announced NES Classic to take their shares of the Nes Clones. I think it would be a good idea to make money where there are none right now. 

The NES Mini makes sense because Nintendo gets all the money (minus the retailer cut, obviously) and because it's a closed system, so there's no implication that more games will be arriving for it. The NES Mini does not contradict the premise "you need to buy Nintendo hardware to play Nintendo games", but putting Virtual Console on smartphones does.

Nintendo thinks long term, not short term. Of course they could earn money by putting their console games on smartphones, but that would ultimately come at the expense of their hardware sales, and if people don't buy Nintendo hardware, they obviously won't buy newly developed Nintendo games either. That's very detrimental to Nintendo's core business. Same reason why Nintendo won't put their old games on PC, PS or Xbox either. Sure, if they did that, then they would make money from some place where they are currently making none from, but it should be obvious that it would have a notable negative impact on the sales of Nintendo hardware as people would come to expect to see more Nintendo games on non-Nintendo hardware.

On the other hand, Nintendo's actual smartphone strategy raises awareness of their IPs which in turn motivates people to buy Nintendo hardware, because that's the only place where all the main games can be played (in legal form, of course).

People don't buy Nintendo systems to play NES/SNES games, I reckon. Why do you think gamers would stop buying new Nintendo systems if they could find games from 20 years ago on other devices? It wouldn't be Wii/GC games, but games from the 1980's and 1990's.