
Nintendo: Apple's Latest Prey - chaostheory
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904888304576473493285312436.html
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sebkomianos
I am neither the best analyst nor do I have any information. But I am going to
comment on this mainly because, having owned almost everything they released
and because I have a lot of great memories from its games, I am really
emotional about Nintendo.

They have been in the industry for almost 40 years: started distributing
Magnavox in 1974, made huge success with Donkey Kong arcade in 1981 and
released their first consoles in the beginning of the same decade (Game Watch
and Famicom-NES).

No company has made it that far, no company has been so innovative and no
company has had the lows of Ninty (Sony is probably having a bad era with PS3
but that's their first bad release -handhelds excluded- and Microsoft has been
doing fantastic with all XBoxes). Furthermore, no company managed to even come
close to Nintendo in the handhelds.

As much as I love Apple (and can even consider myself kind of a fanboy) I just
can't stand it when they try to involve it everywhere and explain everything
as a result of its success.

Nintendo is Nintendo's prey, they dug the hole that they fell into. The 3DS is
not selling bad because people are buying Angry Birds instead of Super Mario.
It's not selling well because, well, what is there to sell? It's unbelievable
that Nintendo released a handheld with such a weak launch-titles line. Tell me
one game that will make you want to buy 3DS. You don't buy a console and then
wait for games to come out. You want the games there. Unless it's something
really major, like the Wii, when you can see its potential and you can do with
games like Wii Sports for a while.

But the 3DS is a handheld, I am not going to buy it just to spend 10 minutes
on a Piccadilly line ride playing mini games and waiting for a few major games
to come out, when they come, with the quality they come out, etc.. I can
compare that to playing Doodle Jump and Doodle Jump wins easily. What I can't
compare to Doodle Jump is a Zelda/Mario/AAA game on my 3DS.

It's not about Apple vs Nintendo, nobody will buy an iPhone to play video
games. And it's not about whether Nintendo can do well as a iOS/Android/WebOS
games developer. Of course they can and I hope they do if they get in such a
bad position. What it really is about is whether Nintendo can help handheld
gaming keep its value.

Also, it's not hard to see that they are going to fall into another hole if
they don't do MAJOR things with the WiiU. So I am kind of glad that the 3DS
release wasn't successful, I can hope they are getting a few messages..

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glhaynes
Nintendo's in an _awfully_ tough spot here. Their success in expanding the
market to non-gamers (the "blue ocean strategy") puts them in exactly the
wrong place for 2011 where it appears likely that most dedicated gaming
systems are going to be owned by the hardcore going forward. Many of their
newly-won customers from the last few years now have all the games they could
want on systems they already own and those games have average price tags of
maybe 20% of what they are on traditional platforms. And they're better
connected for social, too.

So Nintendo doesn't have room to make particularly enticing hardware - it'd
have to be super-cheap to tear people away from platforms they already own for
other reasons but it'd probably have to be super-expensive to be different
enough to be exciting.

And, even worse for them, the bottom has completely dropped out of software
pricing. It's tough to pay $40 for a 3DS game that I'm likely to play less
than something for $2.99 on the App Store. I'd buy Mario and Zelda for it, but
that's probably it.

With the very Nintendo "make something cheap but that's so different and so
cool that everybody with an iPad would still want it" option off the table,
what can they do? Can they survive just selling <$10 games on somebody else's
hardware? Maybe a partnership? An Android partnership doesn't seem likely to
deliver Nintendo quality in the short term at least and Apple is quite
unlikely to partner with them. No other mobile platform seems worth their
time.

I do wonder if there's a team working on Zelda for iOS... And another team
preparing a massive reorganization. Seems like a terrible option but I don't
see what else is going to be available to them. Hope they can find a good way
out of it because they're one of the most innovative companies in the world.

~~~
copenja
I agree with the general gist of your post, but I actually think there is
still a large market for casual gaming hardware in the living room.

Consider that the Microsoft Kinect broke the record for consumer electronic
devices for selling the most units in 60 days. Yes, it even outsold the iPad.

[http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/03/kinec...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/03/kinect_breaks_sales_record.html)

~~~
hugh3
Are casual gamers the ones who buy devices in the first 60 days after launch,
though? Most "casual" gamers probably still aren't really sure exactly what a
Kinect is or what it does. (I know I'm not...)

~~~
TikiTDO
Casual gamers are driven by trends and early adopters. A lot of these people
know what Kinect is because their "nerd friend Alphonso" won't stop talking
about how cool it is. Don't knock the early adopter crowd just because they
are small; while they may be that, their extended social circle is generally
large enough to sway even the mainstream numbers.

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dpcan
My Kids have DS's. But for Christmas, I bought each of them and my wife an
iPod touch.

The concept was simple, I spend about $70 more per device, but instead of
buying $500 worth of games over the next 2 years, I will probably spend $50.
Why buy $35 DS games when the kids are happy with free and $2 iOS games?

Also, Nintendo should have been smarter than to bet on 3D. The theaters can do
it to up-charge us for a minimally better experience, but most people could
care less if 3D just went away. The fact that Nintendo bought into "3D is the
future" feels very 1985 to me.

The DS and DSi are so good, and the kids love them so much, my personal
opinion is simply to move in the direction handhelds have been moving already
- better graphics and faster processors. The next step is to lower the prices
of their games, but I don't see that happening.

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r00fus
Re: 3D, it's way beyond Nintendo...

It does seem many seemingly sane companies are going off the deep end here.
What's with 3D? No one I know cares for or buys this crap (at least knowingly,
one happened to buy a 3D-capable HDTV, but he's never attested to using it for
that purpose)

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hugh3
Y'know what it reminds me of? The "Virtual Reality" craze of the early 90s.
Everybody went on about how awesome it was that in a few years time, once the
graphics hardware caught up, we'd all be putting on virtual reality helmets,
not just for games, but for _everything_. "Man", people said after playing
Dactyl Nightmare for the first time, "when the graphics get better, and we
figure out how to make small, light screens, this is going to be awesome!"

What happened? Well, the graphics caught up, and we figured out how to make
small, light screens, but we also figured out that wearing a virtual reality
helmet is annoying, gives you a headache, and really doesn't give you any more
feeling of immersion than just watching a big flat screen.

~~~
dpcan
Exactly, which is why I made the 1985 remark. It feels like the helmets all
over again. Why not have Max Headroom do an ad for the 3DS and we're all good.

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smackfu
Was anyone ever excited about the 3DS, or its pricetag? Think that is more to
blame than Apple.

~~~
jswinghammer
Most my favorite games over the last 3-4 years have been on the DS so I might
have been if it hadn't been for the fact that I've been enjoying games on my
iPhone and iPad almost as much.

If Square/Enix released more games for those platforms I'd be excited and
would stop even considering getting a 3DS.

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smackfu
If you were a parent, which would you rather buy?

1\. iPod Touch, $229. Most games are $1, but some go up to $5.

2\. 3DS, $249. Many games are $40. Even old games are $20.

Even with a price drop, I'm not sure the economics work out for Nintendo.

~~~
hugh3
By the time my kids are old enough to be trusted with portable electronic
devices, they'll be old enough to have their own allowances and make their own
damn decision about what do buy.

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JoelMcCracken
Apple has huge stashes of cash. I keep wondering when they'll do something,
like purchasing Nintendo. So far, all of their purchases have seemed pretty
minor.

I think most iOS games are low quality. Even when they are extremely polished,
they lack depth. Having brand new mario and zelda games on the platforms would
reverse this.

Beyond that, from the little bit that I know about Nintendo's next console
platform, it sounds basically exactly like Apple TV plus an iPad.

Beyond that, Apple also has a really strong platform for distributing software
over the air to non-desktop/laptop devices. I think Apple is in a better
position for next-gen gaming. I don't know if the next Nintendo console is
going to have games that are distributed via physical media, but if they do, I
wont be buying one. At this point, having to go out and buy a game, and
getting up to switch games, are big negatives.

I'm not sure if nintendo has enough experience to do this right. It looks like
3ds games are still sent via physical media, not over the net. Besides that,
using the Wii for watching Netflix nightly leaves me with the distinct
impression that the Wii was designed with internet usage almost as an
afterthought, certainly not as a core function of the device. Which is fine,
but even basic functionality improvements haven't happened. Every time you
switch networks on the wii, it asks you to perform a system update, which
takes 5+ minutes to _check_ to see if your system needs updated. Which seems
insane to me for something that amounts to sending a hash of app_ids ->
versions.

Additionally, Apple tries to remain very family-friendly, which is a market
that Nintendo dominates in the traditional gaming market.

It certainly seems like a smart move.

~~~
Steko
I'd guess in about 18 months when Wii U flops in holiday 2012 there is going
to be a huge bidding war between Microsoft and Apple for Nintendo exclusivity.

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hugh3
For all that has been said about gaming on the iPod/Android, the state of the
art in games there is still pretty low-rent, low-budget.

I mean, what's the big hit? Angry Birds, which looks like it was written by
one guy in two weeks. Sure, people enjoy playing it, but it strikes me that
the market for big fancy games is still not served on these devices.

There's a market in between "casual" and "hardcore". I don't want a game I
have to practice for five hundred hours before I stop being a "n00b"... but on
the other hand I do want a game that can really hold my attention on a twelve-
hour plane ride. Something with a real story, and an adventure, that
progresses as I play through it, and where my reward for playing more is
something other than "now do the same thing with a more complicated series of
boxes".

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rexf
As a Nintendo customer, their software lineup has become very uncompelling. To
the point where my Wii & DS haven't been turned on in over a year+ and there's
no reason to buy the 3DS (even with price drop). N64 ports and other remakes
aren't appealing.

Nintendo has been complacent riding the gravy train of casual gaming (Wii
Sports type minigames, fitness, etc) for great financial success that doesn't
constitute epic AAA gaming (core franchises like Zelda, Metroid, etc).

They aren't competing well VS direct competition (Sony, MS). With iOS &
Android platforms to contend with, it isn't going to get any easier for
Nintendo.

To compete against free & .99 cent app store games, Nintendo needs compelling,
epic AAA games at the $30+ price point that they charge for. Not 3rd party
shovelware.

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MrVitaliy
I think Nintendo's valuables are not in hardware (anyone can build a hand-held
console these days) but in the huge library of very famous games.

If 3DS has lost the game, nothing stops Nintendo from re-releasing some of
popular old games for iPhone (perhaps developing a descent emulator for iOS)
and keep writing more excellent games in future.

Example: iD made another stash of green from Apple's app store when Carmack
released Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone.

~~~
kabdib
If they do ports, then Nintendo stops being a hardware company.

They'd have to fire a /lot/ of people, for starters.

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ja27
Lately when friends ask my advice about which DS, I suggest getting an iPod
Touch instead unless they're really dying to have Nintendo property games
(Mario). It does more than just games, no cartridges to lose, and the kids
will want an iPod soon anyways.

Even the equivalent games are cheaper. LEGO Harry Potter is $4.99 on iOS vs.
$14.99-19.99 on the DS. Sims 3 is $6.99 on iOS vs. $27.99 on the DS.

~~~
TikiTDO
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that when most people
think of a DS, or any other Nintendo product, the Nintendo properties are the
first thing on their minds. If you are getting a DS you probably want to play
Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, or Metroid. If those do not interest you, then you are
still more likely to be interested in some sort of JRPG or maybe a fighting
game.

I am a gamer, and I was not even aware that there was any sort of market for
LEGO Harry Potter or Sims 3 on a DS. In this case I think the stats support my
view: <http://www.gamestats.com/index/gpm/nintendo-ds.html>

You may note there are only four non-Nintendo properties in the top 20 popular
games, and of them only one (GTA) has a native iOS port, while one more (FF6)
could technically run on a SNES emulator. I hope no one asking you for game
platform advice was hoping to play any of the most popular portable games of
the day.

