Nintendo Soars as Super Mario Mobile Game Comes to the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo Soars as Super Mario Mobile Game Comes to the iPhone

bloomberg.com

181 pointsadventured144 comments

There's a common fallacy that happens frequently when Silicon Valley technologists start talking about Nintendo, and that is the idea that "their hardware can never compete with the ubiquity of mobile platforms, they should just become a software company and port their games to iOS and Android!"

The success of Pokémon Go, and this new Mario game as well, is showing that Nintendo is taking a different strategy: they're creating custom-made mobile games for the purposes of driving attention and vigor to the main games on their hardware platforms. You can see this with Pokémon: the success of Pokémon Go has been driving sales of the 3DS and the currently-released Pokémon games, and will surely help bolster the hype for the next-generation games that are due out later this year. As far as strategy goes, these mobile games are more similar to the TV shows and movies Nintendo makes than the DS games they came from.

I think this is a good strategy for them. An iPhone or Android will never be as tailor-made for gaming as the Gameboy or DS were, so it's good to see Nintendo sticking to their principles.

I think its a great play by Nintendo to use mobile as a new conversion/user acquisition channel. I don't think we've seen any changes in the way Nintendo has been acquiring/marketing to new (non-previously-Nintendo-platform-owning) customers in the past 5 years. Putting their base IPs on popular mobile platforms is what appears to be their first modern approach at customer acquisition and will likely serve as a good upsell strategy to their hardware platforms.

I wonder if this is going to become more of the norm, with companies putting out apps like Pokemon GO that use the brand image over top of a pretty basic app that's flashy but doesn't have much depth.

It really is just an interactive ad for Nintendo's brand.

<southpark_reference> I wonder if it even knows it's an ad? </southpark_reference>

I agree with your sentiments. Perhaps it's because I didn't grow up with touchscreens, but I find the controls on anything but the simplest games to be less intuitive on mobile than on a handheld device. It isn't that bad when you just need to tap somewhere, but when it comes to interacting with a control for any length of time, I much prefer to use a physical one rather than a virtual one. Holding B to sprint, or moving the directional pad or joystick quickly, works much better in the physical world. Perhaps phones are much better as gaming platforms than the typical UX design gives them credit for, but I can't imagine a phone replacing the sheer joy my Gameboy Color brought me when I was 8. I mean, the LCD on those things absolutely sucked, and being able to charge your battery is awesome, but a Gameboy is a complete experience. Nintendo is more Apple than PC -- that is to say Nintendo makes a complete product, where the design of the hardware plays as much in to the experience as the software.

For instance, one of the most common complaints with Pokemon GO is that the game monopolizes your phone while you play it. You have to have the game running in the foreground of your phone with the screen on at all times. If you switch to take a call, or you switch to play some music, or use your GPS, or whatever, the game stops tracking your progress. By designing separate hardware, Nintendo is free to make decisions like that without upsetting people who (rightfully) expect apps to be able to share space on their phone. It's easy to compare Nintendo consoles to those produced by Sony and Microsoft and determine that Nintendo is losing the war, but in the end, Nintendo is creating an entire experience. Their methods are sometimes questionable (I'm looking at you, new Star Fox), but unlike Sony or Microsoft, they have created an ecosystem that depends on the unique features of their systems. The reasons I'd purchase a PS4 or a Xbone are 1) I want a platform exclusive game 2) I want to play with my friends who have the same console or 3) I want to be able to play multiplayer games more easily than I can on my PC. There is nothing on this list that a PC couldn't do if given the chance.

On the other hand, Nintendo has done a lot of cool things with the Wii U. The wiimote and nunchuck actually works pretty well now that I've gotten used to it, and their platform exclusives use their hardware really well. I hung out with my 6 year old cousin all day on his birthday and played splatoon, which is a ton of fun, and makes really good use of the game pad and screen. The game pad is pretty sweet in general. Being able to play a game while other people are using the TV is pretty sweet. My friends and I will sit around watching sports, while one person builds a custom level for us to play in Smash Bros. Plus, it solves the issue of LAN Hacking, and allows one player to have information the other players can't see, which has been used to good effect in a few games and definitely has a lot of potential.

Regardless, I think claims that this is the last generation of console-specific hardware are exaggerated in general. I think Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will still be producing consoles in ten years, just because the simplicity of a gaming appliance will always be appealing to people. Ensuring a phone or a computer is properly set up and specced to run a game will always be more than a large number of people want to deal with, especially as we get in to new technologies like VR and AR.

One thing that I think really separates the discussion about Nintendo is the awareness/cluelessness about the fact that Nintendo have, in fact, have their hand in so much of Silicon Valley, already.

I remember in the 90's, SGI and Nintendo shared a multiple of projects, hosted at the expansion offices at Oracle. The goal? Port Netscape to the N64, and so on.

Nintendo are all over the place. Of course they have an iOS team already, duh. They worked with Creative Labs already, to develop competing frameworks to iOS, even before iOS 1.0 was released.

All these things got cancelled/re-structured, and Nintendo still have a strong, forward-deployed, developer mentality.

So, its not that they are not, actually, operating as a development group in our industry. Its just that they haven't "surfaced", yet, because their strategic deployment of co-development teams and integrated efforts doesn't, necessarily, mean that a product will bubble to the surface.

Does Nintendo actually have a hand in Pokemon Go? I don't know what the relationship between Nintendo and the Pokemon Company is.

They own a piece of The Pokemon Company and a piece of one of the companies that owns a piece of The Pokemon Company. No one really seems to know if that amounts to a controlling interest or not.

But empirically, it seems unlikely an independent Pokemon Company wouldn't put out Pokemon games for non-Nintendo platforms.

Well, Pokemon Go is a non-Nintendo platform, so it could go either way (maybe Nintendo did it to increase the value of the franchise, maybe the Pokemon Company didn't do it more to avoid diluting it).

The announcement of Mario Run seems like a pretty clear indication that Nintendo has shifted, some time in the past, to thinking of phones as not competing with their consoles/handhelds. Pokemon Go and Mario Run may have begun development concurrently for all we know at this point.

They (along with Google and the Pokemon Company) also invested up to $30 million into Niantic, the developer of Pokemon Go a year ago [1].

[1] http://www.recode.net/2015/10/15/11619616/nintendo-google-to...

It's a bit early to tell if the mobile Mario game will be successful. Remember the last real successful non-free mobile game was Angry Birds. Pokemon GO and this new game are entirely different because one is free-to-play and the other is not.

That's disappointing because the featured app store page where you can be notified says it has IAPs.

I've seen several people say that the app is a demo version with a single "unlock full game" IAP.

In my personal experience, this strategy has worked remarkably. One morning my friend and I were out eating breakfast and discussing the Pokemon Go craze. Then we started talking about our childhood experiences with pokemon on the gameboy, and how we didn't know any of the pokemon after the second generation, so the new games would be completely novel to us. We got so nostalgic that we decided right then that after we paid our bill, we would go to the nearest BestBuy and get a nintendo 3DS and Pokemon X and Y, so we could relive those childhood days. That was a great week. And we will probably get Sun and Moon when it comes out. Before this, I had not bought a game since xbox/ps2, but I have no problem supporting a company that has given me so many countless memories (NES/gameboy/N64).

> they're creating custom-made mobile games for the purposes of driving attention and vigor to the main games on their hardware platforms

I'm not convinced that they are going to make more money that way. Time will tell, I guess.

I've seen a lot of people saying that Nintendo were kinda dumb for taking so long to capitalize on the incredible brand recognition of mario and pokemon, and looking at the money pokemon go is making, I don't disagree. But I think that the reason a lot of non-nerds cared so much about pokemon go is that pokemon still meant the same thing to them as it did 10 years ago. So the reason that those brands are still such a big deal to people may be because Nintendo has used them relatively conservatively.

"But I think that the reason a lot of non-nerds cared so much about pokemon go is that pokemon still meant the same thing to them as it did 10 years ago. "

My kids were aware of Pokemon before the GO from the cartoon series but were not terribly enthusiastic about them. They went like nuts for the Pokemon GO game. Anecdotally, it's not just the brand, but the game itself which people feel enticing.

The game is a real flagship for "compelling idea badly implemented". It doesn't run on quite a lot of Android phones, it's really resource hungry and prone to crashing, the Pokemon location system has never really worked, and the only interaction between players is indirectly at the gyms.

And yet it's still compelling enough to play. And I mean play, rather than sink microtransaction money into like the big money mobile games.

My son went the other way - lost interest in the game within half an hour, but found clips on Youtube and got hooked on the series and now want the older games.

Franchise fatigue is very real IMO, and it's all the more evident with the recent trend of annual franchises in video games.

I wonder if Star Wars will suffer the same fate at the box office eventually.

I think the Marvel franchise is quite fatigued atm...

I disagree. The problem with marvel is we know what to expect, it's really hard to outdo any previous movie they release and it feels they are going down hill, but I often wonder if you swapped the releases of some movies would the same still hold true that the sequel isn't as good as the first or would the sequel be better than the first.

> it's really hard to outdo any previous movie they release

This is exactly it. Each epic battle scene is so over the top it's almost impossible to come up with something even more epic and over the top. Too bad they don't realize a good story doesn't need that. I thought the older James Bond movies had it figured out.

You're being unfair there, Marvel Studios movies have pretty decent stories and a lot of comedic value even disregarding all the action. There is a reason they never get panned like a lot of the DC ones.

They occasionally deliver. The second Captain America movie was a fairly good spy thriller, IMO.

But each movie in the MCU doesn't necessarily have an epic fight that tries to outdo the previous movie's epic fight.

Comic book movies in general are fast reaching the breaking point, at least with reviewers. But I'm sure the studios are well aware of this and will maximise for as long as their moment lasts

> at least with reviewers

Because that's how big budget blockbuster films successes are judged. Reviewers.

Just in case you're not simply being facetious: whether movies are well-reviewed or not definitely influences their success.

> Just in case you're not simply being facetious

Of course. I generally don't bother to indicate when I am. I just don't like explained jokes.

Of course I do try not to be subtle about it. :)

I tend to think franchise fatigue is less of a concern with movies because movies are short-enough in length that you don't feel like you just finished (or haven't finished) the predecessor when the sequel comes out.

I'd worry more about the Marvel TV products than the movies, or if the movies fail as stand-alones (like Ultron).

> or if the movies fail as stand-alones (like Ultron).

Ultron was the seventh highest grossing film in history ($1.4b gross; budget of $316 million) and the second highest grossing Marvel movie (after The Avengers).

I'd love a failure like that.

I'm not saying it failed as a movie, but that it failed as a stand-alone movie. Imho, that's the kind of thing that would cause fatigue - too many interconnected pictures coming out that are too tangled together so viewers have no idea what they're watching unless they've perfectly kept up.

Ah, that makes more sense. I don't think that's an issue unless there are no "jumping on points", and if there's one thing Marvel is good at, it's creating artificial new starting points...

And there's lots of jumping on points coming up, with Dr Strange, Spider-Man Homecoming, Black Panther and Captain Marvel having mostly characters new to MCU and seemingly being relatively disconnected. Thor: Ragnarok might qualify as well depending on how they do it. Ant-Man and The Wasp might too - there's not much of the back story you need to catch up on.

Marvel has a large enough stable of characters to keep on churning out new standalone movies for a very long time. Though they'll need to start dipping into less well known characters, their ensemble movies and TV series will presumably let them test characters.. Then give the top performers sequels...

If they manage to get back control over e.g. X-Men and Fantastic Four too, they'll have characters to draw on for the next couple of decades at current rates...

At which point they can start all over.

I hope they never get the X-Men into the MCU, having the Mutants and the Avengers in the same universe benefits neither.

To be honest, I still love going to superhero movies every 4-6 months. I an always count on good action and good characters, even if it may not be as good as previous movies.

I don't necessarily think that's too little time between releases, as an avid movie goer.

What about franchise dilution?

I'm not sure what a Call of Duty game means any more, other than it's going to be a FPS.

They have had different teams work on the games, there aren't any common characters, time periods vary etc etc.

Eventually? We were all thoroughly sick of it after the original trilogy was released umpteen times, let alone now after after the 62 home video and box set releases to date: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_home_video_releases

I think that was something different than franchise fatigue, as those were cases of a very slight variation of the same thing being released over and over. I think franchise fatigue is more about new stuff being released in the same setting and people being tired of the setting. People were still very excited about Episode 1 when it came out (not so much after), so I think that points to it being less of a franchise fatigue problem than an overexposure of a few movies (at that time, at least).

"I wonder if Star Wars will suffer the same fate at the box office eventually."

Star Wars has transcended "franchise" and become a tax. There is a star wars tax that we all have to pay and that tax rate graduates as you have children.

Death and star wars. They're inescapable.

I recognized this and escaped a long time ago.

...in a galaxy far, far away. :D

Being slow and conservative has probably contributed to the fact that they have been in business for over 120 years.

Eh, that's sort of disingenuous to say, though. They made playing cards for more than half of that. Ditching your business model of 70 years to going into an emerging technology market (video games in the 80's) isn't really conservative.

They're still making playing cards.

And it took them 18 years (1956-1974) of experiments with new ventures (including a cab company, and love hotels, and assorted toy ranges) before they started selling video games. Another 5 or so before they got successful. Donkey Kong came out in 1981 and finally made them lots of money from it.

So ~25 years from they realised the playing card business didn't have room for further expansion until they had settled on a new direction that made them enough money for it to become the main driver of the company.

Yet 35 years after Donkey Kong, they're still selling playing cards...

Seems pretty conservative to me.

Are people buying the cards, though? How much of the business is dedicated to the cards? I'd reckon it could fall into an ocean and much of the world wouldn't notice. I don't call that success.

It's probably a rounding error by now, though big enough that they host tournaments etc..

But the point was to illustrate that Nintendo is in fact a quite conservative company - they've held on to what they started doing well over a century ago, despite having switched focus to video games 35 years ago, after spending 25 years researching and developing new businesses to find the right new direction.

I'd argue that assuming their play card sales are now a tiny proportion of revenue, that just underscores this point - I can't imagine they need it, but it's part of their legacy.

> the point was to illustrate that Nintendo is in fact a quite conservative company - they've held on to what they started doing well over a century ago, despite having switched focus to video games 35 years ago,

If they dropped the playing card business tomorrow I don't think it would change my opinion whatsoever on whether they are still a conservative company or not.

> But the point was to illustrate that Nintendo is in fact a quite conservative company - they've held on to what they started doing well over a century ago, despite having switched focus to video games 35 years ago, after spending 25 years researching and developing new businesses to find the right new direction.

I agree with this, but I can't say it's clear that's a good way of doing business.

Given how few companies worldwide survive this long, it would seem they are doing something right. Whether this is part of that or not, I don't know.

Considering that pokemon is also a card game... :)

Even when the cards themselves were popular it was as a collectible supporting the video game and TV show, not as a primary interest. That their popularity derives entirely from recent innovations implies their conservatism is not what makes them successful.

I don't know if I follow your point. They probably had some equipment that was ideal for printing and shipping cards. They were able to leverage that equipment to make money.

Specifically stated, there is money they would not have been able to make, had they not also printed some playing cards. Do you think it would have made sense to just abandon that money?

> Specifically stated, there is money they would not have been able to make, had they not also printed some playing cards.

Sure, there's also money I'm not making by not busking. It doesn't mean busking is a good way to invest my time and money.

You are ignoring that it is an efficient utilization of equipment and expertise they have. It would have been foolish of them not to try a collectible card game on top of one of their franchises.

It's important to highlight that Nintendo have stayed true to one of their core principles: that the game should reflect the characteristics of the hardware it is played on. They've done this to great success before - think of Super Mario 64 pioneering 3d control with the analog stick, or the wiimote gestures used in Wii Sports.

They've correctly identified that mobile gaming is done with one hand, and even if this is not the first runner game on an iPhone, it's the right choice for a Mario game.

It would have been easy for them to whack up a virtual d-pad in a traditional 2d platform scroller, but I'm glad they've attempted something new.

It literally looks like Rayman Run clone. Not that it's a bad thing, Rayman Run is excellent, but I don't think Nintendo is pioneering anything here.

Just like Rayman Run is a clone of some other thing.

Pretty sure Canabalt was the first real runner on ios.

First endless runner anywhere! Invented the genre.

Hmm... I'm not sure about that.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/bill-gates-and-donkey-bas/

http://segaretro.org/Drivemobile

WarioWare came out in 2003 and included what is (if I understand the term correctly) an infinite runner

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=65xStDAjNCM

I think Aztec Challenge on Commodore 64 might have a strong claim here.

It's not an infinite runner, though - you move on to other levels. You eventually go back to start and have to go through everything over and over, but the running part is punctuated.

3D World Runner for NES?

At the very least, there were one- and two-button runners in Flash for some time before Canabalt.

I think Canabalt is like Doom or Super Mario Brothers--it was the first really polished implemention of its genre that showed its full potential and led to an explosion of other games, but it didn't invent the core concept.

Canabalt is an "infinite runner" game. It isn't close to the same genre/ style as the Rayman games (which are action/ puzzle games, where you have to find and use dexterity to collect 100 "Lums" in each of the many small levels).

They are pioneering for themselves. Nintendo's increasing participation in mobile platforms is very exciting even if they aren't particularly revolutionary in their releases.

Rayman Run is in landscape mode. Huge difference IMO.

Execution is important though, and Nintendo might surprise here.

He also stated that it will be a non-freemium game, which I think would hurt the Nintendo brand. Hopefully they don't go down that road.

Nintendo has made plenty of Freemium games - Miitomo and Badge Arcade.

Nintendo has also pioneered (?) free-to-start games, such as Pokémon Picross (where it starts off micro-transactiony to get "energy" but once you've paid $x all shop items are free)

freemium is bad

Call me cynical, but I still don't believe that you can clone a endless runner game, slap Mario on it, and expect it to be successful on mobile. I get that it's a big deal that Nintendo and Super Mario are coming to mobile, but as soon as the novelty of the news is off I think they'll face a pretty major reality check.

I'm generally a fan of Nintendo/Mario and the video of gameplay looked like it might have hidden depths. Have to wait for the reviews I guess.

I would agree...except that it's Nintendo. Especially if Miyamoto himself was involved, I suspect it's going to be spectacular in ways I'm not currently imagining.

A billion downloads for Super Mario Run is a pretty realistic estimate, I think.

Of course there will always by cynics calling that a failure, whatever the percentage of buyers.

I think the Mario IP combined with an App Store feature, which it is almost certain to get, should give it respectable enough download numbers for Nintendo to consider it a success. Endless runner games historically don't monetise as well as other genres so allowing the user to trial the game then pay a fee for full access might work out better for them than if they had went the micro-transaction route. The decision to include the one off payment would suggest to me that they don't see it as an ever-green game with monthly updates like Pokemon Go and expect it to have a much shorter life.

Did Pokemon even get featured on the App Store? Once your name recognition is big enough, traditional marketing is just rounding error.

It did, but long after it was already popular.

I can't remember for certain if it got a banner feature but I think it did.I agree though that it had very little effect on the success of Pokemon GO as a large amount of people downloaded when it was still in soft launch phase and before it was properly featured by Apple.

Just checked and here in the UK Super Mario Run already has a banner feature and is top of the new games we love section despite not being available yet to play yet

It already is featured in the App Store (with a "notify me when this becomes available" instead of buy button)

The whole point of this for them is to promote their Mario games on their systems. (Like what Pokemon Go did for Pokemon on the 3DS.) It's basically today's equivalent of the Super Mario Super Show.

I mean it worked for Pokemon Go. Take a mediocre game, slap a beloved IP on it, and it prints money. The novelty obviously has worn off quite a bit, although I think that has a lot to do with the unresponsiveness of the developers and slow bug fixing.

Endless runners seem to enjoy good success. Anything with Mario slapped on it enjoys huge success, be it party games, sport games, platform games etc. For now, Mario is missing (pun intended) on the smartphones.

Seems to me that this is a winning combination for a HUGE success.

It isn't an endless runner. It has actual hand-crafted levels, like Rayman Jungle Run, which is much better than any endless runner I've ever played. With Nintendo's level designers, I expect it to be pretty fun.

I've noticed that both here and on reddit there's a vocal population that is really upset that this is being called an "infinite runner" because if the non-procedural and therefore not infinite nature.

It feels kind of like arguing about hacker and cracker.

The reason I brought it up is because Nintendo's level design is fantastic. I expect the levels to be varied and interesting, unlike most endless runners. My comment's parent was specifically talking about the novelty wearing off, and well-crafted levels don't rely entirely on novelty for fun.

I didn't mean to say that I disagreed with your conclusion about level design mattering a ton, I was just commenting on nomenclature and how it seems to be coming up with this. Most people seem to call Rayman Jungle Run an infinite runner too.

Oh but you can. You can almost argue that we've settled for every other endless runner game only because it sort-of reminded us of Mario and ultimately, we've just been itching to play a Mario runner on our phone this whole time, and that's all we've ever wanted.

Look at the graphics of Flappy Bird and tell me it's not inspired by Mario.

Reuse of graphic assets from a game doesn't always mean the new game was inspired by the game the assets came from.

> Call me cynical, but I still don't believe that you can clone a endless runner game, slap Mario on it, and expect it to be successful on mobile.

Nintendo has a history of taking existing genres they don't have much experience in, making it their own, and releasing really compelling games. Pikmin for RTSes, Splatoon for FPSes, etc. I don't think they're going to half-ass it.

Those 2 aren't really successful franchises.

Splatoon is the 6th best selling Wii U title so far, and seems likely to overtake most of the ones above it, which are between 6 months to 2.5 years older. It represents 5% of all Wii U games sold to date, and has reportedly sold faster in Japan than anything since Wii Sports (2006).

Sounds quite successful to me, though of course it's still only a bit over a year old so who knows if it'll last.

Wii U though? Seriously?

Yes? There are more than 10M of them.

It's also in the top 20 of Wii/Wii U games combined.

Good interview with Shigeru Miyamoto about this.

http://time.com/4482878/super-mario-run-apple-iphone-shigeru...

Nintendo has a proven track record of making amazing one-button games, so I really can't bemoan the lack of buttons too much. WarioWare (especially Twisted) and Rhythm Tengoku/Heaven are among my favorite series and would be a perfect fit for mobile!

I was about to say that. Nintendo has tons of games that are perfect for mobile like you said. There's also Dr. Mario, Mario Puzzle & Dragons, Mario and Donkey Kong minis on the run... and the list goes on.

No disrespect to Nintendo, as I think the game looks pretty cool, but it's awesome how the average human's investment memory is now down to 45 days (remember when Nintendo stock ripped after Pokemon Go?)[0]

> Shares in Nintendo Co tumbled as much as 18 percent on Monday after the company said Pokemon GO would have a limited impact on its earnings - their biggest setback so far after a huge run-up on the smash-hit game.

[0]: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-nintendo-pokemon-stocks-id...

The issue with Pokémon GO was that they were simply stakeholders, not the prime owners (Pokémon is itself an individual company owned by GAME FREAK owned by Nintendo - so Nintendo itself has limited $$ from the game).

Whereas, so far as I can tell, this Mario game is 100% Nintendo.

The difference is that PGO was developed by Niantic, a third party developer, who pays Nintendo licensing fees. The licensing terms were not public, so it makes sense that the initial pricing of Nintendo would favor them to be optimistic, before correcting to a lower price upon hearing the news from Nintendo that the fees would minimally affect revenue.

Mario will be developed directly by Nintendo and they will keep 100% of the revenue it generates.

>>Mario will be developed directly by Nintendo and they will keep 100% of the revenue it generates.

Minus the 30% that Apple takes.

While possible, I find it hard to believe the Nintendo didn't manage to come up with a Special Deal just for them. I mean, Nintendo entering the iOS market, properly entering it, strikes me as worthwhile enough to Apple as well as Nintendo that they probably made a custom deal.

Or perhaps I'm over-valuing Nintendo's position, of course. Anyone have thoughts on the matter?

Yeah but their stocks ripped because nintendo only owned a 3rd of the stake in the Pokemon Company & nintendo made an announcement that they didn't expect this to affect their earnings

Call me skeptical, but it's sad to see how hard the stock market responds to online buzz of a product not yet in stores and not yet available without even knowing whether Nintendo will receive any long-term value from it. The current price is being driven purely on speculation, bang for buck bubble expansion. As soon as any "real world" effect is revealed regarding the value of Nintendo, market price will adjust accordingly.

People aren't interested in investing in Nintendo, they just want short term profit.

It's also serving as a good signal to Nintendo that this path is indeed what people want. The price will probably correct, good chance to short.

Nintendo's biggest asset is their intellectual property portfolio with very strong franchises (Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Star Fox, etc). In theory, any of their games could run on a PC, or a rival console. But they leverage their IP to sell their subpar hardware. This business model worked great for decades, but as new strong players like Sony and Microsoft joined, now their influence and revenue is not enough to keep them afloat.

Nintendo needs a share of the mobile gaming market, beyond handheld consoles. This is why they invested in DeNA (and DeNA invested in Nintendo).

As someone said to me recently, if you said this was a thing ten years ago, people would have thought you were insane. Nintendo releasing a Mario platformer for smartphones? What is this sorcery?

They even mentioned not putting Mario on smartphones in 2014:

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2014/01/20/nintendo-has-no-plans-...

But hey, here we have a Mario platformer on smartphones which basically acts exactly as people would expect it to. How times change!

I for one am rooting for releases of their old games on iOS. I've been playing tons of the Final Fantasy games (Tactics, V, now VII, and earlier I as well) and I really don't mind paying 10 or 15 bucks for tens of hours of game play even if I already owned them on the PS1 at one point. If they could release some of the Nintendo and Super Nintendo games, I'd probably pick some up. Especially for a nice price point like seven or eight dollars.

Nintendo didn't create pokemon go. Pokemon go is really just a skin on top of Niantic's previous game.

In many ways, Nintendo "created" Pokemon Go simply by lending Niantic their Pokemon IP. Side by side, Ingress and Pokemon Go are very similar... but the difference between being a marginal game (Ingress) and being a pop cultural phenomenon (Pokemon Go) is Nintendo's art and IP.

Game Freak was pretty involved, though. So was Iwata.

http://nintendoeverything.com/niantic-on-pokemon-go-masuda-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go#Development

I really hope it has virtual bricks that hang in the air over certain spots and you have to jump up to "hit" them and pop out a coin. The thought of seeing a crowded square of people essentially doing jumping jacks is really amusing.

This looks cute, but now this means that we can look forward to waiting until they announce Mario Kart for iOS. Would pay like 20 USD for a good implementation of it - especially with online racing!

Pokemon Go was a start. Mario runner - everyone expected it, of course.

BUT, I personally believe, should they decide to make it, a Nintendo Universe game will be the biggest thing to ever hit mobile. If I can create my own massive Nintendo land, with Mario and Luigi's house, tubes, Koopa Castles, goombas running around, and then there are mini games to earn "coins", etc.... I think I'd finally play a game on my phone again, the nostalgia-pull would just be too intense to resist.

Why would you want such a game on your phone?

Funnily was playing a "running game" https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fun-run-2-multiplayer-runnin... with my colleagues for the first time a couple of days ago. The Genre is fun and works on mobile.

And now it's announced Super Mario Run will be a Nintendo game on IOS.

Released on iOS first. So it may well come to android in the future.

I'm not a fan of endless runners (or any smartphone game for that matter) but one of the few games I enjoyed on mobile was Rayman's endless runner games, so I may give this one a chance.

Same here. Endless runners and their simplistic controls are a good fit for smartphones, while any action games which tries to mimic gamepad buttons on the touchscreen ends up being awful to control.

damn how weak must nintendo be to have its market value change so much on a single game that has yet to be released.

Pokemon Go is perfect for mobile gaming but 3D games are impossible to be playable in the long run on mobile platforms. But, Nintendo is still new in this area. They made a revolution with Pokemon go and I expect them to push forward.

Going to agree with you on that one. As a gamer, I find it hard to embrace mobile gaming but with Pokemon go things went in a different direction.

Nintendo didn't develop Pokémon Go - they just licenced out the IP to Niantic.

http://pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/en/

The Pokemon Company licensed out to Niantic, Nintendo is just a big shareholder of that. Aka, Nintendo did not do anything there.

Incorrect. They actually had a finger on this product.

"The concept for the game was conceived in 2014 by Satoru Iwata of Nintendo and Tsunekazu Ishihara of The Pokémon Company as an April Fools' Day collaboration with Google, called Pokémon Challenge." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go#Development

I'd recommend Severed

http://severedgame.com/

It's totally designed for mobile but ends up feeling like good console game. It's easily my favorite iOS game to date

-Usual "The Pokemon Company and Nintendo are two completely independent entitys in this regard" comment goes here.

If Nintendo is a big shareholder in The Pokémon Company, then they aren't completely independent now, are they?

So Nintendo are making nothing from Pokémon Go? I thought -- from reading in various places -- the project was a collaboration between Niantic, Google, and TPC; and that the latter had Nintendo as the major shareholder (minor shareholder + using a shell company that they're major shareholder of)?

Am I completely mistaken?

" 3D games are impossible to be playable in the long run on mobile platforms"

So.....people putting hundreds of hours into 3DS and Vita games are what, wrong?

Worse: They're having fun in ways someone doesn't like.

Revolution by putting stale 90s kids' franchise to Ingress?

Who needs this except of those who has nostalgia? It's the same as releasing pong or space invaders for iOS. Fun to play for 5 minutes and delete from phone. Nintendo stuck in 80s in technologies and it's only trademark-holder now. It's already myspace of gamedev.

Except they consistently release high rated games year after year.

I wouldn't go as far to say they're stuck in the 80s, but when it comes to technology and current trends Nintendo is consistently considered the lagging player (the fact that they're still grappling with online gaming and infrastructure is laughable).

The general consumer doesn't understand how miserable a failure their latest console was and that the small catalog of "high rated" games (debatable considering their releases this year) isn't enough to sell that system to an audience beyond diehards and children. Their pivot into mobile is admirable (chasing the cohort they lost that made the original Wii a hit), but in terms of long-term growth anyone looking to invest should hold-off until their next console (NX) shows promise beyond the mediocre niche they currently occupy.

> but when it comes to technology and current trends Nintendo is consistently considered the lagging player

Technology was never their selling point—even the original NES came out with an 8-bit processor while 16 bit processors were already available. Why? Because it was cheaper, and easier to develop for.

Their main selling point has always been strong gameplay experiences.

NES had only two types of games: either you jump on top of enemies or you constantly move right and kick them. Actually there were only two games but with different sprite images. But even that was wonderful in 1982, because it happened on your TV, like movie, but controllable by you! And they're trying to sell the same 'magic VCR where you can control retarded boy jumping on mushrooms' in 2016. Except on phone handsets instead of TV sets. Maybe someone will be heavily impressed that instead of dialing and talking you control virtual italian plumber right on your telephone!

Off the top of my head I can think of many other 'types' of NES games that break the side scroll paradigm. For example:

Top down action RPG (Zelda)

Decision based RPG (Dragon Warrior)

Picture games (Anticipation)

Game show games (Family Fued)

Sports / Racing games (Punch Out, Rad Racer)

ETC.

You really need to research more about Nintendo...

A selling point which isn't enough in the current climate when it comes to living room hardware. As of June this year the Wii U has only sold (to retail, which doesn't actually mean total sales to consumers) 13.02 million units worldwide. [0] Compare that to the either Playstation 4 or Xbox One sales and the pricing of their new 4K iterations (respectively PS4 Pro and Scorpio) and it's obvious to see both enthusiasts and the typical consumer no longer value Nintendo's games enough to shell out $300 for their small catalog.

Their current strategy consists of developing and selling software to the casual cohort they lost between the Wii and WiiU release, in order to bolster new hardware sales. Buying their stock on the announcement of that software is ill-advised because no one knows what their new hardware looks like and whether or not they can convince that audience to spend cash on it when the alternatives are such better/easier sells.

[0] https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/hard_soft/ https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/2016_01.html

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