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Nintendo Finally Working On Games for Smartphones
Several readers sent word that Nintendo is finally bringing its games to mobile devices. It's partnering with Japanese game publisher DeNA to develop games for phones and tablets based on Nintendo's popular game IPs. (Existing games will not get mobile ports, however.)
DeNA first approached Nintendo about using the company's characters in mobile games back in 2010, Iwata said, and has been passionately pursuing talks on the alliance ever since. Iwata acknowledged that the transition from the Wii and DS lines to the Wii U and 3DS lines has not gone "as smoothly as we had expected," but he maintained that industry watchers predicting the death of dedicated video game consoles are being too pessimistic. Iwata tied the move to smartphones to Nintendo's historical embrace of TV gaming after decades as a physical toy and card game company during a time when TVs didn't exist. "Now that smart devices have grown to become the window for so many people to personally connect with society, it would be a waste not to use these devices."
... they don't just partner with Apple and bring out a console. And yes, it should be called the iConsole.
This can be seen as Nintendo just expanding into the casual market, but I remember what happened to Sega...
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
... computing is becoming a commodity. PC gaming is growing leaps and bounds as the bottom billions start to enter the global middle class, you have mobile phones, laptops, ipads, etc. Computing is slowly becoming a commodity device that will ultimately be everywhere. This doesn't mean total death for consoles but you don't need three different PC's (which is what consoles are, they use modern PC 3D chips). The console generations will slowly get longer and/or end because we're nearing the limit of transistor shrinkage (aka there won't be much advantage to releasing a new console if there is no new hardware available anyway). Costs and times for shrinking transistors are escalating enormously and it's going to take some radical breakthroughs in computing to move it forward. Things that most likely is going to take decades or or perhaps a century at least.
If valve can somehow get into console land with steam machines you can expect PC gaming to ultimately take over, not that I'm saying it will but if he finds some way to crack the console market it's a possibility.
All the consoles are basically rebadged PC's with some customization, that's all they are at this point.
It's been over for a while now. The first Wii was promising, but I don't think they've had an idea since then. Their decisions have seemed poor and unfriendly for years. Their user agreement is one of the worst I've seen, and possibly even illegal given the child's role in interacting with it. Seems like it's time to make money by cannibalizing the brand. People comparing this to what happened to Sega are right on. If you think Sega is still intact, please try getting some Chaos Emeralds on Sonic 2 on your Android, and tell us how the support story goes when it crashes.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
The newly announced hardware is not going to be a new console. It is going to be a new portable. But not just any old regular portable!
After seeing all the buzz about Oculus VR, Project Morpheus, and SteamVR, Nintendo has decided they want some of that sweet, sweet VR action for themselves.
That's right, NX is actually a codename for... the Virtual Boy 2!
DUN-DUN-DUNH!!!!!
Pretty soon we won't be calling them smartphones anymore. We already have Personal Computers, so maybe PDA will make a resurgence.
Several readers sent word that Nintendo is finally bringing its games to iOS devices. It's partnering with Japanese game publisher DeNA to develop games for iPhones and iPads based on Nintendo's popular game IPs. (Existing games will not get iOS ports, however.) DeNA first approached Nintendo about using the company's characters in iOS games back in 2010, Iwata said, and has been passionately pursuing talks on the alliance ever since. Iwata acknowledged that the transition from the Wii and DS lines to the Wii U and 3DS lines has not gone "as smoothly as we had expected," but he maintained that industry watchers predicting the death of dedicated video game consoles are being too pessimistic. Iwata tied the move to Apple devices to Nintendo's historical embrace of TV gaming after decades as a physical toy and card game company during a time when TVs didn't exist. "Now that iOS devices have grown to become the window for so many people to personally connect with society, it would be a waste not to use these devices."
what I envisioned years ago was Nintendo games equal to that of the 3DS being brought to the smartphone, and equal to their home consoles being brought to the PC. only time will tell if what we actually get are shitty ass cellphone games like developers are known to make that don't rival a console's polish or quality.
I'm still waiting for a game as epic and well done as Zelda Majora's Mask 3DS or say Animal Crossing New Leaf on my cellphone. I own those games, they are both so complete, expansive, gorgeous looking, nothing plays like them, looks like it, or is as expansive as it on my Android cellphone. The worst we get is a bunch of knock off games featuring the Nintendo logo and character faces.. or some 2D games that aren't high quality 2D or high quality 3D.
A challenge on cellphones is typically the controls, because touch screens don't play well with real games.
obamasweapon.com
industry watchers predicting the death of dedicated video game consoles are being too pessimistic.
I'm not so sure. I've had a PS4 since release, almost a year and a half now, and there's still a dearth of titles. Around the same timeframe with the PSOne, there were more titles than I had time to play, and I had far more free time in those days. It feels like there are a handful of recurring titles dominating the landscape -- the yearly installments of Battlefield, CoD, Madden, Need for Speed, Assassin's Creed, and whatever else I'm forgetting -- and precious little else. Without games, what's the point of owning a console? Streaming media maybe, but I can get that much cheaper elsewhere, and it's even built in to many TVs these days.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
...it will be on a monster of a system with several 27" monitors and screaming graphics cards.
NOT some dinky 6" screen (at best) using my thumbs.
For the current generation of very young kids, their first taste of video gaming is Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Candy Crush, Temple Run and the like, played on their parents' mobile devices. They're not going to ask for a Nintendo when they're older; they'll ask for an iOS or Android device. The days of selling "kiddie" handhelds with QVGA screens and $40 games are numbered. I'm just glad Nintendo has finally decided to start rolling with the tide, rather than face being washed under, like Polaroid.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I can't wait for them to put games on my new Apple watch! It would be great if they made watch games.
for iphone?
Then Nintendo had a lot in common with Now Apple. Games were simple enough that indie developers could make hit titles that Nintendo would then publish and distribute as cartridges, which is basically what the App eco system is, minus the hardware. But Nintendo was Apple, not an App developer... and to stoop to that level is seppuku harakiri suicide.
What if Nintendo made an official NES emulator app and publish every NES game ever made... add a gamepad accessory built to legacy standards, and the NES graveyard just became a NES-fan's utopia. Do this for the SNES, Gameboy, N64... whatever an iPhone can handle. Keywords: Every game ever, identical, fingertips. This wouldn't be just another App or just another game. It would be Nintendo via my phone! Can't wait!
It is GOOD that they are considering mobile media, especially since 3DS and DS were and still are great hardware.
And it is sort of bad that they aren't directly porting some things over, on some levels.
They could port SOME games directly, especially simpler games, strategy games, party games, all workable on tablets and phones easily.
Mobile devices are pretty powerful now, and more and more people are getting in to both casual gaming on there, and more advanced (what would be considered core to regulars) gaming.
Both Nintendo and Sony seriously need to reconsider dedicated hardware as a main portable option, and open up to the general portable world from phones to tablets. (hell, just go full support for everything, but at least these first)
Software makes considerably more money than hardware does, especially the cheaper you go, which is what both companies are going to have to come to accept in the long run. Steam is hugely profitable despite lower prices, sometimes considerably lower.
Right now the Used market is eating away at profits because the price of games are simply too high (even though they are cheaper overall than they have been if you count inflation)
A lot of people won't go above a certain threshold for games and will buy games that they don't consider absolutely brilliant Used in almost all cases, so decreases in profit. Lowering this price of entry to games will increase sales more than the loss.
Both Steam and Hollywood are evidence of this. Films typically cost insane amounts of money, but sell for very little and generally tend to make quite a bit of that back and more so.
Physical game prices simply have to come down for it to survive, there is no any other way. And they won't do it until it is probably already too late, because these companies are all about high profits in the short term. That first week and first month are the most important, everything else is literally not cared about by them. It is a disaster of business and it is known not to work well for cheaper industries.
Pricing in general will change considerably over the next 10-15 years, it will have to or there will be no gaming. (at least dedicated)
Digital Downloads will not replace physical any time soon. Networks cannot handle it. No, your connection is not standard, it isn't even remotely standard. Most gamers have pretty damn awful connections, and most don't regularly game online.
Game servers already struggle horribly whenever large events / patches / games or similar come out, just imagine if the ENTIRE userbase of those systems were all active. It could never cope.
And it isn't just them, ISPs won't cope in general, which is again another failure of high profits. ISPs were struggling horrible the past 10 years to upgrade to support video streaming. Some still are. Mobile networks are suffering even more. Mobile networks are SHIT. The tech doesn't scale well yet, and the experimental versions that might allow it to scale are years away from being the norm, and expensive as high hell.
Oddly enough, despite the massive increase in bandwidth in the past decade, we are hitting another point where high compression will likely become the norm again, like it used to all those years ago on the early internet.
As games increase in complexity, so does the size. Smart compression, procedural generation, they are going to become a necessity or you will be paying large bandwidth costs for those patches.
It isn't so much the bandwidth that matters, it is the servers and routers that are the issue. The prices of these exchanges are increasing through the roof because of the speeds they have to deal with.
So, no, DD consoles won't happen any time soon. DD consoles are a dead console. Look at uh, that is pretty funny, I forgot the name of it, that little crap cube console built for Android games. The previous sentence is proof enough, it was a horrible failure, so much so that I even forgot the name of it, and I made pictures mocking them at E3 with their
You obviously don't follow Nintendo very well. They're amazing at selling very few units and yet still making obscene amounts of money. I've seen them sometimes get called the Apple of the gaming world.
Smartphones/tablet may be a good fit for Nintendo. People don't buy Nintendo for their console tech (though the wiimote was neat in the beginning), they buy because they make fun games and have a good history of releasing fun games in their key series (Zelda, Metroid, Mario, Donkey Kong Country), as well sometimes coming up with new fun stuff.
They're more of a games company than a console company, but they're also control freaks. Hopefully this is a sign of positive change.
Ohhhh look at me I'm so edgy it hurtssssss
Go walk into traffic, you little shitstain.
The idiocy among these comments is absolutely incredible.
...but a ton of people do, so they're just expanding their reach. It doesn't mean Nintendo's traditional console/portable games will go away by any means, especially if they are able to offer unique experiences through specialized hardware. Even then, the experience they offer with traditional game controllers is enough to draw a dedicated following.
Twinstiq, game news
... that releases games for iOS only. **** that. There are millions using Android.
I've also heard from several people they're one of those smartphone game companies that does shovelware apps that just look to nickel and dime people to death.
One issue they will have to face is that on mobile platforms, the going rate for most games seems to be anywhere from "free" to $2.99 or so, with VERY few games charging more than that..
The cheapest Nintendo game you'll currently find on either the wii or DS / 3DS at this point in time is $19.99, which many of their bigger titles selling for $49.99 or even $59.99 on the wii u
In order to make any significant headway into the mobile market, more than likely they'll need to put the price-point of the game significantly below their current console & handheld levels in order to even remotely compete with existing mobile games..
That means that either:
1) They'll try to sell some Mario/Kirby/Whatever game for Android and ask an almost absurd $19.99 for it in an attempt to keep the status quo that is likely doomed to fail.
or
2) They'll be forced try to sell it for $2.99 or less to compete with other mobile apps, destroying their DS ecosystem from the inside out by directly competing with themselves at much lower profit margins.
Modern tablets and smart phones really flipped the entire gaming ecosystem upside down, and at this point in time Nintendo is either damned if they ignore that, and damned if they go along with it. They need to be careful or they'll be reduced to another Sega in the long run.
They should just go multiplatform, their top games would sell so much more units if they went multiplatform (not that I'm a fan of their games, far from it, I find them mostly boring), it would propably easily make up for not having to invest money in developing their own hardware..
Most games are probably property of other parties (not Nintendo) and/or use licenses that have long expired. Getting the entire catalog available in a legal fashion is very unlikely to ever happen.
The PC doesn't need AAA games, it's doing plenty fine with kickstarter and indie games completely dominating the platform. Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, RimWorld, Minecraft, Broken Age, Prison Architect, Cities: Skylines, Satellite Reign, Hyper Light Drifter, Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous... the list goes on and on.
Steam machines don't need to take over either, they're just an alternative to the ever growing platform of choice for gaming. Steam hit 9+ million concurrent users this month and there's no sign of it slowing. If I was Sony, Microsoft and especially Nintendo, I'd be really worried about this. The hardware is becoming irrelevant. What matters is the games and the platform you provide for gaming.
Here's the real plan that Nintendo has for mobile:
First off, forget re-releases of old games on cell phones. They won't be doing a Virtual Console, selling old emulated versions of their games, and if any classic games appear they'll be "Remastered" versions specially designed for the device. There may be a marketplace that will (finally!) be tied in to your Nintendo account, and probably transfer in some way to your 3DS and other marketplaces, but it'll sell new titles featuring familiar characters and settings.
They see and understand the market they're entering, and will be making games specifically for it, like "Freemium" Dr. Marios with 5-plays per day energy metering with the option to buy tokens to get more plays. If you've played Pokemon Shuffle or Puzzle and Dragons, you get the idea.
Their new "Console" will probably lean more in this direction, tying their existing IP into the mobile game experience in some way. Remember the Chao idea from the Sonic Adventure games? You'll probably see more Tamogachi style mobile gaming featuring Pokemon and other Nintendo fauna and flora, with options to "feed" them with real-life cash.
Eventually it'll either flop and Iwata will say "I told you so!" or it'll be so successful that investors will want to know why they're even bothering with a console at all. Why spend three years making a new Legend of Zelda when they can push out a new "Link's Candy Crush" every six months.
Moral of the story - be careful what you wish for. Getting the Nintendo experience in your pocket might just be at the cost of having a Nintendo console in your living room.
what nintendo should do is put a 4g lte or whatever 5g chip is coming soon into the 3ds. the 3ds already has most of the necessary features of a smartphone, and a great library of games, if it could make calls and send texts then it would be the only device in my pocket. a 3ds 4g for $250 off contract would be one of the best smartphone bangs for the buck, and i'll bet companies would actually be interested in making apps for it. bonus points if it could trade pokemon (or other game stuff) while in a call to someone also using a 3dsphone, but i doubt they could pull that off