I think this is a signal that Nintendo is at least thinking of getting out of gaming. True, getting out of a market that has turned what was once a relatively small family owned company into a multi-billion dollar multi-national corporation sounds insane, but Nintendo always has seemed to operate by its own logic. In many ways, they still seem to think like the small family owned enterprise they once were.
Clearly. they haven't been happy with the returns they've been getting from gaming for some time: at least since the early 2000's when development costs really started to rise. This dissatisfaction drove their constant attempts to disrupt the gaming market and seek out blue oceans where they could extract greater returns on their investments.
I also think their upper management has grown dissatisfied with the decline of gaming as an activity in Japan. I think part of the reason for the shift away from western development in the Iwata era was the fear that Nintendo would become too much of a western company. Even without the decline of the gaming market in Japan, the sheer size of the Western market compared with Japanese market seems to necessitate a western focus in order to appeal to non-Japanese gamers.
If Nintendo really were interested in correcting their problems so as to increase their marketshare in gaming, you would think they would be investing money to correct their problems in that area. You would think they'd be building up their internal development teams, expanding their western development, creating infrastructure to reach out to third parties, and building an online infrastructure.
But they aren't.
The money they are spending on this solves none of their current problems in terms of the marketshare they are losing. Will it generate enough revenue to offset their continually shrinking revenue in the gaming market? Its tough to say without knowing what the hell this represents.
"Non-wearable" as term, unlike terms like PC's, tablets, or smartphones, is purely defined by what it is not. Apparently, Nintendo's next product is not a console, not something you carry around, and not something you wear. Then what the hell is it?
The whole thing doesn't fill with confidence, especially because, like gaming, the health and education fields are also fiercely competitive. If Nintendo finds the gaming industry, a marketplace they have the advantage of having competed for over 30's years, too competitive, I can't imagine how their going to feel competing in fields they have absolutely no experience in. It's not even like when they entered the market for console and arcade gaming, which was still a fairly young and open in the late 70's and early 80's. Even then they needed the existing market dominated by Atari to crash to create an opening for them.
I just fear they that, although they are providing rationalizations grounded in the logic of business, that Nintendo is doing this for the wrong reasons. Their leadership is doing this because they want the company to remain essentially an extension of the small family owned company it was before it entered video-games. I don't see how they can do that and remain a multi-billion dollar company of the size they are today.
