Stop me when you disagree:
Companies should do the kinds of things that they're best at. I'm not an artist, so it stands to reason that my efforts to break into the art world would be met with failure. I don't have the kind of creative or visual intelligence to do well in that field. Likewise, it would probably be unwise for me to start up an airplane manufacturing company, because it seems like making planes would be really expensive so I'd need a lot of upfront capital and I'd also need to hire people who know things about airplanes and manufacturing and everything else. Sometimes a big company with enough capital can expand into a new sector if they are aggressive with hiring, attract talent, etc.
And the same is true for big companies. If Intel decided to start an app store (they did), I'd expect it to fail (it did) because Intel is not really a content company at its core. It's an excellent engineering firm. They probably hired some people for the App Store, but they certainly didn't make waves with their hiring or put emphasis into it.
Now, clearly Nintendo makes excellent and imaginative software. There's no doubting that. So if someone said "Nintendo's new strategy is to emphasize software", I think that would be a good move. Hold up, I told Nintendo to emphasize software and their response was that they're best at hardware+software. We'll put that aside and assume for a second you're correct and the "QOL" business is software and service oriented.
Well, is Nintendo's core competency making rich network services? You tell me. They outsourced Swapnote (now mostly shut down because they lack the capacity to manage it or deal with the first minor PR issue they had with it), external companies helped with Miiverse which itself was a rough around the edges launch, Pokemon Bank is a simple CRUD website and launching it brought down their whole network and required a pretty amateur hour rescheduling of the product. They outsource their web browser (poorly, too, who the hell thinks NetFront is a viable option today). They don't have a web-accessible eShop. They used GameSpy for matchmaking and other services for the original Wii. They have never ever dealt with or been able to deal with hacking or cheating in any of their online games. None of their netcode has been notably good. So based on Nintendo's history, do you think Nintendo would be well suited to really aggressively go after building rich network services? That's what you're proposing they're doing.
Now, let's again assume you're correct and it's software. Let's assume Nintendo does a great job delivering. How is this a blue ocean? Name a lifestyle thing you think fits or is consistent with what they would do? Personal Trainer: Cooking was pretty cool, I bet they're release a cooking and recipe service.
Here's your competitor #1, whose free application is wildly popular on iOS and who is owned by Conde Nast, one of the biggest publishing and magazine companies in the world with decades and decades of experience selling cooking and recipe content. Maybe they'll get into knitting. Knitting is pretty cool, very popular among hip young crafty types.
Ravelry.com--enormously popular. Maybe they'll launch a sell-your-creative stuff marketplace? Etsy. Maybe they'll do a a diet tracking or calorie counting or exercise website? There are literally hundreds of these. Maybe they'll partner with a major fitness brand? Who? Microsoft is partnered with Nike who also makes products designed for iOS; Majesco has the Zumba license and no one cares anymore. Gold's Gym has already partnered with fitness software. Xbox One sells Beachbody Insanity and P90X stuff. There's tons of CrossFit software. There's tons of software offering exercise videos, exercise plans. Have you ever heard of Zombies, Run!? It's a wildly popular iOS software where you go jogging with headphones on and occasionally your music is interrupted by zombie noises so you feel scared and run faster. It's part game, part entertainment experience, part fitness. You want to sell books? Project Gutenberg has the contents of 100 English Books for free. So does Kindle. Nook. Libraries all across North America. the iBookstore. We have hundreds of competitors in that field. Want to draw? Tayasui Sketches, Inspire, Procreate, Paper, Art Set, Inkist, SketchBook Pro, ArtRage. I don't even draw, and these are all programs I'd had on my iPad. Want to keep a journal? EverNote. Want to keep a diary of the meals you've eaten? Hundreds of services. Want to keep a diary of the places you've been? FourSquare. Want to list and review beers you've consumed? Untappd. There are social networks and apps for literally everything you can do at this point. All of them have popped up in the last 5 years. That's what's changed between Nintendo's big successes in these fields and today. Half of these programs sync with each other and with Dropbox and with web services. Almost all of these have web services, communication elements, sharing and social elements. So I don't see a lot of uncontested territory in lifestyle stuff.
I'd be happy to go tete-a-tete in literally any product category. None of this is to say that Nintendo couldn't make a competitive entry in some of these categories, but rather to stress that this isn't a blue ocean, it's not a safe space, and I think they'll find the competition even more fierce because the barrier to entry is low and Silicon Valley startup culture and the app revolution has brought an insane bounty of development onto the scene. Things have changed. It's a big deal.
Someone here said that Nintendo's QOL stuff felt like a CES briefing. I agree. CES is a January trade show in the US for people who make electronics and software services. There are tens of thousands of products shown every year. And every year big companies talk about their vision of how they're going to change the future by entering "untapped" (really tapped by dozens of products and services) and none of them ever deliver. It's all philosophical talk.
CES has an annual awards vote. They have a category for Health and Fitness. There were
17 nominees this year. A tinnitus solving hearing aid. A smartphone/3G enabled blood glucose monitor. A pill box that knows when you've fucked up. A sensor that tells if you have pre-concussion head injury brain damage. A body fat and muscle analyzer. A basketball that reports data over wifi to help you improve your game. A watch that can track people with dementia so they don't wander off. Watches that record your gps position to track your running, count calories, measure your heart-rate, respiratory rate, provide you with coaching on your running technique. And most of these devices are made by companies with more money than Nintendo who have been doing this for longer.
I have no idea if you were ever interested in lifestyle products or services before last night. It's ok if you weren't, of course. But I'm just saying if you weren't and you're under the illusion that people aren't already doing pretty much every permutation of hardware and software and services, well, that's wrong. They are. They're huge competitors. I'll also add that any service being "accessible on Nintendo consoles" is useless. No one wants Nintendo's current console. That's the whole point of diversifying. By this E3 the Wii U will have at best the 6th largest active install base among consoles. Lower if you include mobile. Lower still if you include the AppleTV and various SmartTV platforms. It'd be like trumpeting that your software even works on Symbian or BlackBerry.
