Nintendo was founded in Kyoto, Japan in 1889 as a manufacturer of hanafuda playing cards. The company went through several small niche businesses before becoming a video game company.
As a Nintendo fan, this news makes me feel nothing.
I mean, really. They're going to have a separate developer make games for a platform I don't give a shit about. If it gives them more money to keep being Nintendo, that's great. But honestly, this news seems a whole lot more "whatever" to me than anything else.
Huh. Judging by what Dena has done with the FF and Transformers licenses (garbage freemium stuff even by freemium standards), I expect nothing but disappointment out of this.
To be honest I doubt this will impact their core games business much. Seems like Nintendo's gonna keep doing what Nintendo does except There'll be a couple Nintendo games on my phone now, and that might be kinda cool. Nintendo's been doing some strange things and maybe weird Nintendo experiments like Rusty's Real Deal Baseball or Steel Diver 3DS will work better on phones than on a 3DS.
Also, Holy Crap! The End Times Are Nigh! and such...
The reason why "the suits" think moving to general mobile is a great idea isn't that they don't think Nintendo don't have a successful market selling portable gaming systems and games but that their portable market is **tiny** compared the general mobile market let alone the general mobile gaming market.
I look at the situation the reverse of what many who are "anti-freak out" where I wonder what is so special about protecting Nintendo's Gambeboy/DS platforms. It is nice to have but I'm not sure that is enough justification ignoring a giant and growing market.
Nintendo should've done this a year or two ago. I just fear that their mobile titles will all be mediocre half-games, like that weird Pokemon thing they put out on phones, or a lot of the stuff that they've put out on the eShop. Mobile would be perfect for a new WarioWare game, for example, but it'd be even better if they could make a full-fledged Pokemon game for the systems - a new Pokemon Stadium would even be perfect for mobile. My inner businessman quivers at the thought of how they could monetize those franchises. The rest of me hopes that they can find a balance between quality and monetization.
Either way, it seems like a lot of Nintendo's quality teams have been focusing on the Wii U, which I'll actually be kind of sad to see go, and this announcement didn't necessarily give the impression that they'd be too intimately involved in the development of these new mobile games. They have a history of squandering potential, so call me cautiously optimistic at best right now.
People are expecting traditional games on mobile from Nintendo.
I don't think that's going to happen.
You'll see side games from popular franchises on these platforms, but you're never going to see a mainline Zelda, Pokemon, Mario, etc on mobile platforms.
And there's a lot of copycats on mobile as well. The moment a clone of one their games comes out, Nintendo isn't going to fuck around and just let that slide.
Capturing Pokemons and adventuring costs energy. energy can be gained over time or earned by trading in sapphire. sapphire spending is required to fight against certain gym leaders in order to earn badges and it can be earned through grinding and obtained randomly in game or traded for with cash.
Let's also not forget the regular in game currency, which can also be traded for with ruby, which will also be randomly obtained or traded for with cash. Ruby will also allow you to fight with certain Gym Leaders to obtain badges.
let's not forget that you can buy super rare pokemon market. The market will only accept black gold or white silver, which gate locks what type of rare pokemon you can obtain. black gold and white silver will only be awarded when you trade in a full set of 8 gym badges, which can only be obtained through fighting gym leaders, which is only allowable by paying sapphire or ruby, which can be gained through grinding... or by payment through cash.
Or you can just straight up buy everything with cash.
You know a Nintendo rep somewhere is reading this and taking notes and then proceeds to cash in on said ideas and you won't be getting any cent of the millions they'll earn from the ideas they stole from you!
Hi Alex! Nice post here mate, keep them coming! When it comes to the news of Nintendo getting into the business of mobile game development, I need to admit that like me, millions of gamers must be over the moon. I am pretty sure that things will work out and I can’t wait to see what comes up!
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