Sure. One thing is, though, having hits in the mobile market; another thing is having enough hits (or enough profitability) such that the business in the mobile market could offset the losses from a "catastrophic 4DS", that is the main source of revenues of the company.
This is certainly true. There's a reason why the NX is something they're actively developing.
That said, Wii/DS -> Wii U/3DS was also a catastrophic failure with tremendous revenue/profit decline, yet they're still around and making money, so this is hard for me to see as anything but a potential positive for their business. Even if it fails, it's unlikely to cost a fortune, and the potential upside has a very high cap.
To use a similar example from merchandizing, Amiibos can't even begin to compare to the money Skylanders make, but they're still a good source of income worth investing in.
Among the unsuccessful companies, I'd put Level-5. Also, it remains to be seen how long-term are the hits of the mentioned companies.
Yes, Level 5 is actually a pretty great example of failure so far. Like Capcom, they're clearly a company that really wants mobile success, but has yet to put up even a single successful title in the modern mobile market.
For the others, I'll provide some brief analysis.
Generally Safe:
- Square Enix - Square Enix often has 5-6+ games in the top 100 and quite a few of those are rank very highly on a frequent basis. Right now they have two games in the top 10 grossing positions, and this is all excluding Record Keeper through DeNA. While about half the titles they release fail, the amount of successes they have far outweigh that.
- Sega - Sega is a smaller company that Square Enix in terms of their video game business, and is constantly reporting back on how happy they are with titles that aren't even in the top 100. They've also continued to experience strong growth both in revenue and in successful title count (by their own definition of success), so I feel it's very unlikely for them to consider their mobile ventures unsuccessful anytime soon.
- Bandai Namco - Their performance is very similar to how they do on dedicated devices in that they release 500 titles and have a lot of smaller to mid sized successes. They're sitting at 11 titles in the top 100, starting with a few at about rank 20, and their output rate is pretty staggering.
Notably all three of these publishers are in the top 10 earners for 2014 on mobile in Japan:
Hard To Say:
- Konami - When their titles do well, they often do very well (they're sitting with two top 15 hits right now), but as their games are all sports titles, they're tied very heavily to the sports calendar. This means they make a whole lot of money during the sports season, and decidedly less when the corresponding sport is not in season. Given people can compete on sports licenses, this does mean there's existing competition as well, but assuming they can maintain dominance in the genre (which they're doing a decent job of), it puts in some reliability as well (assuming people keep liking Baseball and Soccer).
Notably Questionable:
- Marvelous - Marvelous only has one hit. It's a *really big* hit, but it's only one game, which puts them in the same type of position as Mixi and Gung-Ho. The studio that made the game (Aiming) also had an IPO, so I'm not sure if Marvelous will continue to publish their future games. Now, some games last a very, very long time, so this might not be a problem for Marvelous, and their new Magic Castle city builder is showing promise, but I'd like to see 3-4 hits out of them at the same time before I consider them a safe bet. Repeated success would by far be my biggest determinator for long term success.
Business diversification might be good, but it's not a solution per se. Nintendo had everything riding on the blue ocean strategy after the GC, so it'd not be something new for them. Let's wait and see how their approach towards mobile gaming will be.
As it stands Nintendo's core business is still inexorably linked to their hardware and traditional device software, so barring huge breakout success, successes and failures in that arena will determine most of their revenue.
It takes a long time to ramp up other businesses, so maybe that won't be true in 5-10 years, but year if we're discussing the short term or even the mid-term, I agree they have to have success with their next platform if they're going to have even remotely good results.
igitize on PSP did 172k. Famitsu had the first Digimon Story on DS and the first Digimon World on PSone over 200k, but I'm not digging up those MC numbers (if any exist for the latter).
