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Comment by saltyknuckles | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that these hardcore Apple guys talk about putting Nintendo games on iOS when they support a company that makes their own hardware to put their own software on it only. Nintendo has enough money saved up to think of something and I don't see them giving up on hardware. I like that Nintendo takes great care of there games just as Apple does with their software and hardware. Nintendo's strongest business is handheld games yet they should make iOS games. It just doesn't make sense.

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Right. Gameplay experience still matters to a company like Nintendo and for that they need to have full control of their own hardware.

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

Or they need to reinvent it the way they reinvented the DS, from an ugly blobby joke to a money printing machine.

The thing is, if you have to walk out of the house with only one gadget on you, you don't take a Nintendo DS, you take your telephone - it'll give you some gaming on the go, whilst keeping you connected, allowing you to take photos and have a GPS.

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.

>if you have to walk out of the house with only one gadget on you

When would you have to walk out of the house with only one gadget?

It does actually happen to me - do you never do that? But I agree, it was an inelegant expression of my argument. I was trying to get across the idea that a phone will do everything for you - you don't have to buy a separate gadget for games, and many people won't buy a separate gadget, either for money, or because they don't want the hassle of having to recharge yet another device each evening, or whatever. I know plenty of people that used to use Nintendo DSes all of the time, that have ended up leaving theirs in a drawer for these sorts of reasons...

I know I'm an edge case here, but for me it'd be my DS. We're nowhere near significant marketshare, but we do exist.

In fairness, that says more about my phone than my DS, I think.

You have to admit, though, that iTunes on a Wii sounds way less appealing than Mario Kart on an iPhone.

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