| RolStoppable said: Along with Nintendo's announcement of the partnership with DeNA, Nintendo said that no IP is off limits. Your assertion that at that point there were still a lot of people who thought that Super Mario was not going to happen is unreasonable. Regarding all that other stuff, sure, people got it wrong to varying degrees. But that holds true for pretty much every topic. Since we are already talking about Nintendo making apps for smartphones, we could also talk about the people who claimed that smartphones will kill handhelds eventually. But just a month ago we got the confirmation that smartphone apps boost the sales of handheld hardware and software, so the doomsayers of handhelds suffered a slap in the face. |
We must be remebering differently then, I recall discussions about Nintendo's mobile efforts being a side gig with simple apps to promote software on dedicated devices.
I was and still remain a proponent of mobile ruining dedicated handheld markets, the convenience, price advantages, multi-functional design and most importantly; the perceived value of smart devices is just too dangerous and effective in the modern consumer electronics market. Handheld gaming is not going away but dedicated handheld devices most likely are. That said, I've been wrong on too many occassions to count, also in recent times.
When I joined vgchartz, I wasn't unintelligent or anything, but I had a huge bias and most assumptions and predictions were based on what I wanted to happen, and what I didn't want to happen, this is the basis for most assumptions and predictions on this and similar sites.
Around 2010-2011 I started gaming more or less full time on PC again, this was a huge help in seeing and reading the market realities of the time (and even the near future) and I have since taken a much more critical stance on console gaming in general, condoned things I would have condemned before and offered criticism towards companies, concepts and market phenomenon that I would have let lie before.
Anyways; many assumptions are wrong, most of them even, the reason I've focused a lot on Nintendo for the 8th gen is quite simply because they're the ones who screwed it up the worst this time around. It is also partly due to the immense amounts of hyperbole and hubris shown by both the company itself and its fans over the 7th generation and beginning of the 8th. Nintendo were in dire need of a humbling, not unlike crisis-struck Sony in the 7th gen, and by all appearances, they appear to have gotten it, even Miyamoto seems to have grasped the modern market and the role of mobile and social gaming in the future, which is a sign that they've finally accepted that they need to read and adapt and stop relying on striking gold every 20 years and rather realize they're better off selling perfectly good silver every year. I also still find that market realities are counter to many of my personal wishes, both where hardware and software are concerned, this goes for all of the big three and even large parts of the PC environment.
