Mutex Nintendo

Like Apple, Nintendo has seen great success by adopting the Blue Ocean Strategy with the Wii, but now is expected by the public to repeat that success with further innovation. Innovation is hard, and WiiU isn't very innovative.

Neither of these are insurmountable challenges, partly because the public (either kids or adults) is full of casual gamers who don't really care for a lot of innovative in either their games or their hardware. But it's a bit disappointing.

For many decades, I'll grant you, this would have been an almost perfect analogy. Nintendo's brands, characters, and franchises transcended every console generation and consistently drove critics and audiences crazy with anticipation and delight. Mario was the Mickey Mouse of gaming; he and his fellow characters were licenses to print money.

But key to the analogy is that Nintendo used to push the envelope of game design in the same way that Disney pushed the envelope on the animated narrative (and the musical, and the theme park, and so on). The hardware was important, but it was always somewhat incidental. Mario, Link, Donkey Kong, or Yoshi would have grown stale a long time ago if their successive sequels hadn't completely rethought the very fundamentals of gameplay in their respective genres.

You're correct in stating that Nintendo "never targeted the high-end gamer," but for most of Nintendo's history, such a gamer didn't really exist -- at least not in the console space. The particular effect of Sony's, Microsoft's, and later Apple's entries into the gaming business was to segment the market (intentionally or otherwise). Nintendo's brands still appeal across genres, across age groups, etc., but they've grown increasingly limited in reach, due to the segmentation of the market by hardware and platform.

"they dominate handhelds in a way Microsoft used to dominate the desktop business"

And where is the desktop business now?

A very credible argument could be made that the days of dedicated, handheld gaming devices are numbered. (In fact, a lot of consumers no longer draw distinctions between "handheld gaming" as a distinct genre delineated by specialized hardware, and "handheld gaming" as seen on mobile devices). Indeed, Nintendo's core audience seems to be the very audience most readily cannibalized by mobile-device gaming: primarily, younger gamers without a lot of need for specialized, hardcore hardware.

I'll grant you that there's so many things you can do on a DS (or similar device) that simply can't be done on an iPhone. But these days, the gameplay envelope is increasingly being pushed on the iOS side -- not the DS side. Innovative gameplay is Nintendo's lifeblood, and Nintendo needs to be where the most potential for innovation lies.

"And on top of moving games and systems they have a substantial merchandising business probably second to only Disney."

It may seem that way. But "non-game merchandise" represents a $19.2 million business for Nintendo -- approximately 0.2% of its annual sales in 2012. (Source: http://www.nintendogal.com/2012/04/27/nintendo-releases-fina...)

I agree completely that Nintendo had -- and may still have -- Disney-esque potential in the gaming space. But its long-term horizon is cloudy, and it may need a pivot of some sort. Marco's suggestions may or may not represent the ideal strategy (and indeed, I see many of the same limitations in them that you do). But some serious strategic rethinking is in order.

I've seen many suggest that Nintendo should port their back catalog of games over to iOS simply because "people would buy them" - ignoring the fact that these games need dedicated input control and smudging your fingers up against glass with no tactile feedback is a terrible experience. This would never happen (yes I know about emulators).

Nintendo recognizes Apple as their main competitor now and it's hard to compete with a company that refreshes their hardware yearly, making the old "console advantage" not much of an advantage anymore.

Nintendo will always be around, they hold the keys to the greatest video game franchises of all time[1], but I think their future will be in handhelds. You can already see a shift happening as the majority of their focus has been on the 3DS this year.

Their next handheld after the 3DS really needs to be a hit for them.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nintendo_franchises

Nintendo has to compete against that, and it is not easy. On the other hand, Nintendo could make an absolute killing by selling a gamepad accessory for the iPhone - extra battery life plus a decent d-pad/thumbsticks would be an easy sell for gamers. You could probably even price it at a pretty steep mark-up and make nearly as much profit as they must be making on the DS. Make all Nintendo games compatible with it, and run a licensing scheme so that other game companies can list themselves as compatible with the hardware.

This strategy allows Nintendo to continue innovating where they have successfully done so in the past - specifically with clever input devices. It's been a long time since Nintendo could claim to rule the roost for things like raw processing power, so leave Apple to do the heavy lifting there.

http://gamerthumb.com/2013/08/01/mobile-dev-abandons-overcro...

Why would Nintendo go to being lost in the crowd like that.

I understand that both Marco and Gruber see that Nintendo would bring a lot of games that almost seem tailor made to the IOS platform. Animal Crossing is almost a perfect cell phone, but one that is unsullied by micro transactions and the usual mobile bullshit. But they both seem to have a view that what is good for Apple is good for everyone sometimes.

The Euro N64 didn't have RGB and (obviously) neither have HDMI and building the right cable for the GC is... non trivial. Since they were from the 4:3 era you either get a stretched screen or black borders. On the GC it seems to force my TV to stretch all the time even if I set it to 4:3, which is a bit annoying. At least the Game Boy, DS, etc have their own screens built in so this is less of a problem.

I gladly keep a mint SFC with FF3 and Mario Kart packed away than spending a cent on pseudo reminiscent experiences.

"... Sega threw away the Genesis’ tremendous fanbase and success by sloppily releasing the Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn, all of which were overpriced, uncompetitive, and poorly supported by game developers and Sega itself."

No company exists in a vacuum. This is why we promote competition and eschew monopolies, right?