Nintendo shareholders revolt, demand Mario & Co. on iPhones
Bloomberg is reporting that Nintendo shareholders are growing irate with the company and its president, Satoru Iwata, after shares of the company hit a six-year low. Nintendo has seen slouching profits in recent years as mobile phones like the iPhone and other devices like the iPod touch have quickly become must-have portable gaming devices. Shareholders say the company should begin porting its catalog of titles to devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Android phones, something Iwata says won't happen as long as he's in charge.
Nintendo's attempt to push back against smartphone gaming -- the Nintendo 3DS -- flopped causing the company to cut its price by 40% in Japan. With smartphones selling more than ever, and a majority of apps for the iPhone being games, there's no sign of smartphones as the new mobile gaming platform of choice abating. That spells bad news for Nintendo and other makers of dedicated portable gaming platform like Sony.
Another way out of Nintendo's slump if Iwata continues to refuse to port Nintendo's game portfolio to non-Nintendo devices would be for the company to acquire a successful iPhone game developer. That way Nintendo could at least have a presence on the iOS platform while keeping its classic portfolio of games and characters for Nintendo-only devices. Short of doing either of those things it doesn't look like even a real life Mario can save Nintendo's future.
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Bloomberg is reporting that Nintendo shareholders are growing irate with the company and its president, Satoru Iwata, after shares of...
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"it doesn't look like even a real life Mario can save Nintendo's future." Nintendo's obsession with 3D is suicidal. 3D Mario games do not sell. New Super Mario Bros for DS was in the top 10 games sold last month -- across *all* platforms -- it has been out for half a decade. The DS was also the best selling console for the month. If Nintendo wants to sell consoles, they need quality 2D Mario games more than once a decade, but they, and especially Miyamoto, refuse.
August 14 2011 at 2:06 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI just paid $22.87 for an iPad2-64GB and my girlfriend loves her Panasonic Lumix GF 1 Camera that we got for $38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS. I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LED TV to my boss for $675 which only cost me $62.81 to buy. Here is the website we use to get it all from, BidsGet.com
August 13 2011 at 12:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThe shareholders don't understand what they're asking for.
Mario 3DS will likely sell 10 million copies worldwide, at a minimum. That's 400 million dollars in revenue. Do they really think you can get anywhere near that much revenue selling games on IOS? Nintendo overpriced their 3DS, and at the same time failed to differentiate it from the DS, plain and simple, as evidenced by the strong sales that continue for the DS. I love my iPhone, but comparing the gaming experiences on IOS to what companies like Nintendo can deliver is like comparing youtube videos to feature films.
I think the shareholders understand precisely what they're asking for - namely Nintendo to do something meaningful to stop the slide and not keep sticking their head in the sand. Here's the thing - Revenue doesn't matter, it's Profits that count. How much do you think it costs to manufacture and distribute 10 million copies of Mario 3DS worldwide? How much do you think it would cost to do that via something like the App Store?
The problem for Nintendo is that people like you who are prepared to pay for a dedicated portable gaming system, when they already have a cellular telephone that is pretty capable, are becomingly increasingly few. I tend to agree that gaming on a dedicated device is better but it's not sufficiently good enough that I'm prepared to pay for the device, carry the device along with my iPhone, and then pay at least 4-times as much for each game. I can't justify that sort of expenditure, particularly when everything else seems to be so expensive today. I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way and I have a great nostalgia for Nintendo.
Times change and Nintendo needs to embrace that change or risk irrelevance.
I think Apple should buy Nintendo, get rid of Iwata, and port games to iOS (and maybe on the other end find a way to combine the Wii or its successor and the AppleTV)!
August 12 2011 at 3:27 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI want to see Jobs in a Luigi cosplay at E3! :p
August 12 2011 at 12:06 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyDoing all the work (and sacrificing tradition) to get some library titles running on iOS is unlikely to be the incredible revenue generator these shareholders suspect it will.
#1 The ecosystem is filled with games and the average pricepoints reflect a new normal that can't sustain an operation like Nintendo's.
#2 The only people that are dorky enough and sufficiently nostalgic are precisely the types who are going to have a very compelling alternative to official N apps: jailbreaking and emulation.
Nintendo has a serious problem, but simply trying to compete in iOS development isn't going to solve it.
Having a major player like Nintendo on the field, though, certainly changes the pricing game as well as the quality expectation, and there is sustainability for games that way.
Square Enix seems to thrive there, even with new content that is more engaging than some of the stuff they pumped out on the DS. (seriously, Chaos Rings is 10 times the game Children of Mana was in visuals and gameplay, and for substantially less money)
Capcom seems to enjoy moderate success as well, albeit with ports.
But every major games developer is treading lightly so as not to upset the giants of the industry and be left with ONLY the mobile phone platform to sustain them. If they had no fears of doing so, the big boys jumping into the game would drastically change what we think of mobile phone gaming again, in the same way that iPhone has. All it will take is one really bold move.
But you can definitely tell the big players are scared, with Sony hedging its bets on the Xperia Play and Nintendo even being dragged into this discussion of making games for a platform other than their own obviously makes them very scared for their business model and angry/antagonistic with their shareholders.
Would I want to see Nintendo make games on iOS? Yes. Abandon a market that won't be there in 10 years, Nintendo, and put all your resources into fortifying your home console business before you lose that too when something comes along to rock the boat in that market, as well.
The man, quite frankly, needs to grow up.
Oh, and he should probably consider that we're going to play them anyway, since anyone with a jailbroken iPhone's gonna be playing ROMs like on the Android phones anyhow. Might as well make some money, I say.
The problem is that Nintendo's philosophy is similar to Apple's in that they make software on hardware they have control over, creating an "ecosystem" of sorts.
Apple was forced to put iTunes on Windows as it is the heavily dominant platform, and it's total crap because it lacks the OS hooks that iTunes has on a Mac.
While the mobile game device market has slumped, it's not nearly in the same shape as the Windows-Mac divide was.
But I do agree that handheld gaming will be the domain of phones almost entirely in the years to come, simply because more and more people only want one device in their pockets if they can achieve it. Smartphones now allow this to happen and Sony, Nintendo and others simply can't compete with that convenience factor.
And when that time comes, I think we will see things like Nintendo considering abandoning its handheld device market and putting razor focus on the home gaming market again while making software for other handhelds (likely iPhone only, because, as I said, Apple and Nintendo share an "ecosystem" philosophy of tight hardware control to keep an even user experience).
The current CEO has stated that Nintendo games "will not be developed for anything but Nintendo consoles so long as I'm in charge" So unless there is SO MUCH shareholder pressure that he has to resign, I don't see us getting Nintendo games on iPhones. This is an example of why Nintendo is going under. Jobs, unlike Iwata knows when there is potential in a new market (such as iOS gaming) and LEAPS on it, as seen with the iPhone. Combining two topics, that is why Apple is the world's most valuable company and so successful. Nintendo needs to realize the next generation of handheld gaming is in iOS and Android, not just their proprietary consoles.
August 11 2011 at 7:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHuh. I don't follow your logic. The DS systems are still selling pretty well. No need for Nintendo to go into handheld. The casual gamer is badly skewing this market. The iPhone is crap as a gaming device because it lacks physical controls. The gaming experiences are pretty shallow as well. Although I am not a handheld gamer I did enjoy long engaging experiences such as Golden Sun back on the GBA. Shareholders need to realise that the market for the "gamer" will always exist. Those cheap experiences on the iPhone won't last.
August 11 2011 at 8:51 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply
VanillaSpice
Your "lack of physical controls" is more than a year out-of-date. People have moved on. The industry has moved on and smartphones now vastly ... I will repeat that, VASTLY ... outweigh dedicated portable gaming devices in terms of device sales, game sales (units and dollars), and hours spent playing.
You do not represent everyone, you get that, right? You THINK the iPhone is a crap gaming experience but you are in the clear minority in that opinion. Most people aren't put off by the lack of physical controls, no matter how loudly niche die-hards complain about it, most people don't care. They're too busy playing games to complain about it or care.
Your attempts at elitism ("casual gamer" "shallow experience" "cheap experience" etc) are amusing. You know what the difference between a "casual gamer" and a "hardcore gamer" is? One of them is an egotistical fool who thinks they're superior because of their particular choice of game and or platform and or input method, and the other is having fun playing games. Apart form that, they're both just gamers, that's all. Neither is superior or "more of a gamer" than the other.
You only need physical controls if you design the game for physical controls. There's enough games on the App Store that were clearly designed for your finger that shows how it should be done. This said, I have a reasonable memory of Golden Sun and don't see any reason why that wouldn't work well on the iOS platform.
August 12 2011 at 4:13 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate downI bought a 3DS just two days ago because Walmart slashed the prices. Glad I did as I will be buying Mario, Star Fox, Mario Kart and a few others this year...the first thing I said to a guest at our house was 'with Nintendo's money issues this year I'd love to see them get in to mobile gaming on the iOS." There are a ton of clones already and the iOS just needs some strong faces (Mario, Kirby, Zelda, Donkey Kong) they could do it...here's to hope...or at least Iwata getting the can so it can happen.
August 11 2011 at 6:18 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIf only there was some precedent in their corporate history regarding 3D handhelds...
August 11 2011 at 6:15 PM Report abuse Permalink +3 rate up rate down ReplyYeah, if ONLY they had SOMETHING to gauge how 3D devices fair in the gaming market.
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