Nintendo Investors: Bring Mario to the App Store
It’s not easy being Nintendo nowadays. The 3DS is not the smash hit its older siblings were, prompting the company to trim its price to the bone (40 percent in Japan, 32 percent in the US). The once-proud Wii is also suffering lower sales and giving up ground to not only Microsoft and Sony, but Apple and Facebook as well. Nintendo’s stock is at a six year low and the next volley for Nintendo’s hardware, the Wii U, won’t be released in the US until 2012. In the face of all this bad news, plus an overall-sour world economy at the moment, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata is facing pressure from his investors to license Nintendo’s proprietary characters out to third party platforms.
Masamitsu Ohki, a fund manager at Stats Investment Management in Tokyo, was quoted in Bloomberg saying, “Smartphones are the new battlefield for the gaming industry… Nintendo should try to either buy its way into this platform or develop something totally new.” Iwata has said previously that, as long as he’s in charge, Nintendo’s flagship characters will stay at Nintendo, a strategy that Ohki and other financial boffins say will hurt the company in the long run.
All around Nintendo, gaming companies are either moving into or already living in the mobile/browser space. EA just purchased Pop Cap games for $1.3 Billion, Microsoft announced that Windows Phone 7 will interface with Xbox Live, and Sony has the Experia Play. Nintendo even saw a bump when Pokemon Co. let it slip that they’d develop a game for the iPhone and Android OSes, a bump that they lost when Iwata squashed any rumor that other Nintendo characters will be following suit. And, of course, Apple themselves are pulling in (and paying out) billions in revenue off their many App Stores.
As an Apple fanboy, I’d love to be able to play Mario on my phone without jailbreaking it, but what do you think? Should Nintendo hold on to their first-party characters or let them go out and play with other systems?
Source: Bloomberg
Image Source: Cult of Mac
