Senior principal analyst and head of games 
at Screen Digest Piers Harding-Rolls has told Edge that he believes that Nintendo is behind the curve in a number of fields when it comes to next generation consoles. Harding-Rolls cited online and cloud content strategies as something Nintendo has yet to fully embrace. Thankfully, Nintendo announced earlier this week that Miiverse will eventually come to smartphones in the Spring.

“We believe Nintendo looks increasingly isolated in the market. It does not have the luxury of a wider device ecosystem play such as Sony, Apple or Microsoft and it is behind the curve in its online and cloud content strategies. We would like to see Nintendo be more aggressive in ‘hinging’ off its devices using its online platform – Nintendo Network – onto third-party devices as Microsoft is starting to do with Xbox Smartglass and Sony is doing with PlayStation Mobile. Neither of these solutions is significant at present but it does show that these companies are willing to engage users on the most popular third-party connected devices to drive relevance for their own products.”

I hope I pass away before Nintendo follows this guys instructions.

Erm, like they have already announced with Miiverse for the PC and smartphones? They need to do better research.

@cunger: I had the same thoughts...

I really think that this whole "Research Firm" title is being used to validate biases people have. What, exactly, are they researching?

Other than the fact that Nintendo is basically already trying out everything they have said... this article is totally right.

Another analyst saying that to survive Nintendo needs to bring its franchises to mobile devices. That is how it reads While it may make sense at a glance. They will either end up putting the company in danger because of the fickleness of the mobile market and by lessening their platform's fundemental worth or engendering bad will by charging "too much" for their software. Though I could see it. Nintendo making it own mobile development studio and crank out Wii ____ type games and over taking the market. Because that is the stuff that market goes for. ;p

I do agree, partially with the cloud based services. It seems where the industry is actually heading. Unfortantly it isn't there yet. The infastructure of the US and Europe whould have to undergo major changes and the ISP's need to either increase or remove their bandwidth limits because as of right now that is what is killing off and endangering all other streaming services that isn't named Netflicks. A good percentage of the population doesn't have the speed of service needed or they do and with other streaming services they have to watch their bandwidth.

Yes, Nintendo is behind the next gen curve, but only because the next gen was well ahead of the curve last gen unnecessarily. Selling consoles for $600 and $500 is just not healthy for the industry, when software sells are the primarily pillar for them.

Nintendo might innovate in some ways but they are decidedly followers in others. Networking is going to be a huge part of -everything- going forward. Nintendo, however, just seems to do the bare minimum in that area. They aren't trying to push the envelope in terms of networking features but instead seem content to mimic the previous generation of devices from Sony and Microsoft. They'd better hope that neither one does anything groundbreaking with their upcoming offerings.

One analyst's opinion is not research...