Hacker News Reader

Comment by bnolsen | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo seems like it's firmly attached to a narrow business plan and wants to ride that into the ground. At the very least they could be toying with the phone market by releasing mini-games or something under a "nintendo mobile" name.

Tons of people would download that stuff. It would at least get their feet wet, get some developers up to speed and get them some idea of what they can or can't do with the mobile market with probably very little risk.

View on HN

Long term that's a terrible move for Nintendo. Sure short term it would raise money but it would lead to Nintendo leaving the console business and becoming more like what Sega is now.

Better than being dead.

Looking at what Sega has become... They're probably better off not doing that. If Nintendo were to do something outside of their closed ecosystem, it'd be better & much more safer to do it on PC or Linux.

Nintendo needs to hop into the sack with Valve.

Nintendo wants nothing to do with the current mobile market.

$5 is considered premium, when in their market $50 is discounted.

So what does Nintendo do when the market for $50 games has evaporated? It's far too late to start looking at mobile and other markets at that point.

Did the market for expensive sport cars ever go away completely?

Or for that matter, has cheap Samsung Android mobiles destroyed iPhone yet?

Look at the sales of the game industry over time (page 12): http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/esa_ef_2014.pdf It's pretty clear the entire industry is shrinking. I don't know about you but if I ran a major game company I would definitely want to be exploring all options for possible growth right now (or better yet 5 years ago). Comparing video games to high end sports cars is apples to oranges.

That report only includes retail sales. Given the explosive growth of online sales, that isn't surprising.

The problem is most major markets for standard gamers are saturated. Thus you have to turn to emerging markets or non-standard gamers. Given the way last generation went and the way the current generation ignores non-standard gamers, I wouldn't call out Nintendo for their lack of foresight in this regard.

It's a little sad to see things the way they are. Nintendo has a load of beloved IP, and a generation of developers who would likely love to build for a Nintendo platform. But they've failed to capitalize on either.

You have to realize their history though. The "Nintendo seal of approval" exists because the game market was filled with horrible games when they first started, so trusting some other dev with their IP, which could potentially be ruined by a third party. They have been making strides with this (see Hyrule Warriors), but considering the piles of garbage games on the app store, their aversion is understandable. On top of that if you could get Nintendo games on other platforms, their console sales would suffer. Plus, a touch screen would just be frustrating for platformers like Mario, only turn based RPGs seem to port well.

I'm not suggesting they trust another dev with their IP. Perhaps I phrased things poorly. I think it could be potentially worthwhile to make their platform more open to allow devs to introduce their own IP on it. I also think that Nintendo could be doing more to get older gamers who grew up on their games to play Nintendo again (including, yes, potentially making games available on non-Nintendo platform).

Would console sales suffer? I'm not so sure. The market for, say, tablet games may not be the same market that exists for Nintendo DS games or WiiU games.

More than anything, it seems that Nintendo has just decided to do nothing to fix the situation. Even small-scale experiments in expanding their marketplace reach or opening up their platform may potentially encourage investors in their ability to get things back on track again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com