jigglet
Banned
I've been thinking about this a lot recently.
Rewind the clocks back to the mid-to-late 90's. Nintendo had just lost FF7, and Yamauchi made that now-infamous quote about RPG's being for "losers".
Then came Pokemon, the property they only partly own. Sure it's a majority stake but that's not the point; serious money was left on the table. Before it blew up, they would have had every opportunity to own Pokemon outright. In fact, partly-owned subsidiaries weren't a common practice for them back then. However, on the basis of such disdain for RPG's, it's easy to see how they would have been indifferent to this new "Pocket Monsters" game and allowed a precious piece of the pie to be left on the table.
But hindsight is 20/20.
Fast forward to the mid 2010's. Nintendo is still unsure about what to do with mobile tech, to the point of being dismissive of it. Pokemon Go goes on to become a mega hit. It's faded away, right? No, I looked up the stats recently and to my surprise it's still making obscene an amount of money. I'm not talking about in relative Nintendo terms; even against the big industry players it's actually still one of the biggest. Would Nintendo have given away 30% of this pie to Niantic had they had more confidence in mobile tech? Yes you could argue Nintendo lacked the infrastructure and know-how to build Pokemon Go but that's irrelevant; intent is what matters.
I can't help but think what other blindspots are out there and how Pokemon will somehow fit into this picture one day. I have this image of Pokemon being involved in some earth-shattering trend one day that Nintendo dismissed, and by that point Nintendo's share of the venture has been whittled down to like 10%
Rewind the clocks back to the mid-to-late 90's. Nintendo had just lost FF7, and Yamauchi made that now-infamous quote about RPG's being for "losers".
Then came Pokemon, the property they only partly own. Sure it's a majority stake but that's not the point; serious money was left on the table. Before it blew up, they would have had every opportunity to own Pokemon outright. In fact, partly-owned subsidiaries weren't a common practice for them back then. However, on the basis of such disdain for RPG's, it's easy to see how they would have been indifferent to this new "Pocket Monsters" game and allowed a precious piece of the pie to be left on the table.
But hindsight is 20/20.
Fast forward to the mid 2010's. Nintendo is still unsure about what to do with mobile tech, to the point of being dismissive of it. Pokemon Go goes on to become a mega hit. It's faded away, right? No, I looked up the stats recently and to my surprise it's still making obscene an amount of money. I'm not talking about in relative Nintendo terms; even against the big industry players it's actually still one of the biggest. Would Nintendo have given away 30% of this pie to Niantic had they had more confidence in mobile tech? Yes you could argue Nintendo lacked the infrastructure and know-how to build Pokemon Go but that's irrelevant; intent is what matters.
I can't help but think what other blindspots are out there and how Pokemon will somehow fit into this picture one day. I have this image of Pokemon being involved in some earth-shattering trend one day that Nintendo dismissed, and by that point Nintendo's share of the venture has been whittled down to like 10%
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