You act as if Nintendo won't release new hardware. Or any new hardware released by Nintendo won't succeed. No one knows the future. The industry didnt expect the Wii nor the DS to take off like they did. A "return to form"? Really, you can't have it both ways. One could have had easily made the same arguments for Sony with the PS3. Lucky, in Sony case, the whole gaming industry needed Sony to succeed. Nobody ever take this into account when discussing Nintendos platform. Nintendos handhelds was always seen as the redheaded stepchild of the gaming industry in the West and receive piss poor support (or if a quality game was even made, normally, it wasnt marketed well).
Here's the thing--if you have declining marketshare and units sold for 3 out of the past 4 generations, and all of this is basically due to 1 company, then you have been bested all but one time. That's basically it. Saying otherwise is simple fiction.
You are wrong in the case of the Original Gameboy vs it competitors and the Gameboy Advance vs its competitors (it is something called battery life). Heck, even in the case of the PSP, that was basically a play by the gaming industry betting on Sony to end Nintendos dominance in the handheld space. There were plenty of AAA PSP games made(a 3D GTA that have yet to even to be released on a Nintendo platform) vs zero AAA games made by third parties on the DS. I wonder why that was the case? Or are you saying that Nintendo didn't mess up with the Wii U and the 3DS?
People forget that the DS and PSP were neck and neck for a while until Nintendogs and a few other hits that pushed the DS, flat out because they were better games. GBA, SP, etc compared to the Game Gear, etc was consistently in Nintendo's favor. And more over--the same developers that gave support to Sony weren't just doing because they wanted to end dominance, but to see the same level of success that they just saw with the PS1 and PS2, the only two consoles to push 100M+ at that point.
Not to mention that they received a better deal from Sony, despite having difficult hardware with the PS2.
They should consider giving up a billion dollars in revenue from their handheld division (in year with a lack luster release schedule and very poor third party games BTW) to solely pursue mobile gaming? Heck, very few mobile publishers rarely see this amount of revenue even from a string hit games.
Hmm, let's see what I actually said:
There are many more reasons for Nintendo to consider eliminating a part of their business that has become less relevant in comparison to the greater market.
Some people here may not like that, but this just proves out that there is a much larger market they have access to via mobile, and especially in that region.
I am arguing that they should consider eliminating hardware.
Part of the reason that Nintendo could expect larger success is because they actually know how to make fun games, much more than most mobile games studios. And yes, their upside to releasing games in the largest and fastest growing region in the world for mobile games is much greater than 1 billion dollars. Hence, they would be fools to not consider it. They could even keep their archaic division and move more of the pipeline to mobile and still capitalize.
Everybody is so obsessed over the larger number but yet nobody bothers to break down the numbers. When looking the demographics of mobile gamers, half literally comes from Asia. A market (apart from Japan) doesnt even service and in the case of China couldnt even service until now (and that may soon change due to new Chinese government regulations on how mobile games are handled i.e. needs approval from directly from the government). An another portion of mobile gaming is due to gambling, something I doubt even Nintendo will attempt to enter. Never mind, an another portion of mobile revenue come from advertisements, something else I doubt Nintendo would want. And this isnt taking into the account how quick gameplay concepts can be clone and/or copied, the increasing cost of user acquisitions and shorting of time that users are actually engaged in a game. In short, there isnt a one-to-one relationship to handheld to the mobile gaming space.
Ok, so you got nothing. No biggie.
Take a visit to AppAnnie, and look at say, the top 50 grossing games. Then go back next year and the year before. Not a grand amount of movement the higher you go--and this is with the increased costs. Copycats pop up every day, but most of them fail, largely because they are copycats without enough real difference and/or marketing to win.
The premise of your argument is that Nintendo, with a rich history of making fun games, mini-games, platformers, RPGs, would be unable to afford this cost, and unable to recoup greater revenue because the barrier to entry is too high?
I laughed. You should look up how much it takes to launch a new platform sometime.
Furthermore, with the specs of the handheld, Nintendo can best optimize their games. Nintendo loses this ability when developing games for both iOS platform and especially the Android platforms where you are dealing with various hardware configurations and OS versions. This is one of Nintendos strengths that would be greatly undermined with giving up on the dedicated gaming market. No Super Mario 3D Land visuals on 3DS hardware; no Mario Kart 8 on Wii U level hardware; No Super Mario Galaxy on Wii level hardware; No 60 FPS Super Smash Bros on both 3DS and Wii U hardware and on and on
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Not really. Optimizing their games is fairly easy. iOS is one spec. Android has a few different OS, but most companies will release for the most popular specs. The costs of optimizing against a few market spec phones vs building, developing and maintaining your own hardware, with teams, annual budget and updates as well as logistic pipeline, stock estimation isn't even a fair comparison. The former is cheaper.
So, Nintendo should give up one its core competence to solely chase a fickle market and wider market which it doesnt have even the skillset to address?
Nintendo's core competence is making games, period. Translating your core competence to new markets is a basic tenant of staying in business. It's why you can buy latte's at McDonalds and now customize your burger.
Your argument says they should stay in their niche as long as possible before giving up and moving to mobile. I'm saying they should hedge more bets there because there is very little to suggest that the NX will be a hit product or market leader, and it is much better to have a few products for a growing market in the oven.
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