“My feelings for Nintendo are complicated. I’ve loved its games ever since the original Donkey Kong, owned every Nintendo console (including the Virtual Boy), and recommended the Wii U as the best game console for families and kids,” Jeremy Horwitz writes for 9to5Mac. “But if I was mildly displeased with Nintendo as a company during its haughtiest years — the time when most of its key third-party developers walked away — I’m downright angry with it today.”
“At a press conference in Japan this morning, Nintendo announced its second collaboration with a mobile game publisher [DeNA]… Just think about it: Super Mario World on the iPad! Donkey Kong Country on the iPhone! That’s just what everyone has wanted! But there’s a catch,” Horwitz writes. “That’s not what’s happening here. These will be DeNA games using Nintendo characters. That’s like Microsoft giving Hasbro the rights to make a Minecraft board game. And Nintendo’s still not interested in bringing its backcatalog to hundreds of millions of App Store customers.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Nintendo remains as clueless as ever.
Will not happen until they are near death.
Who’s your favorite character? Mine is bowser
I hate to think of the renewed popularity and staggering sums left on the table by Nintendo.
Nintendo shouldn’t waste time releasing games on platforms with subpar control interfaces. Better to have nothing than a poor user experience.
I sure don’t want to play a back catalog of ported games with crappy touch controls. Nintendo will do what Nintendo does best. Create games that are perfectly married to the hardware they are played on. I expect innovative touch based games from Nintendo, not straight ports of old games.
And yet again Nintendo is missing the boat — it could easily create a controller to attach to your iPhone/iPad, either physically or via Bluetooth, which people could buy and then buy a game inexpensively. Brand new revenue stream (both hardware and software) created overnight.
And if Nintendo wanted to protect its new game machines and games, it could simply adopt a policy that no game would be released for iOS until it was at least 5 years old.
Apple could buy Nintendo with the change in its lounge couches . . . .If Beats was a good acquisition, I think Nintendo would be even better.
Not really. Once the back game catalog was released, Apple would be faced with the super-competitive world of game console development and fickle gamer customers. Game consoles are basically a money losing business, something Apple isn’t going to get into. The software would make money, but Apple has the opposite business model: Make money on hardware, provide great software to make the hardware indispensable for your customers.
In the early days being first mattered, a LOT.
But, the tiller to control direction of an automobile faded with the first introduction of the steering wheel.
Damn. I read the headline in excitement, until the last word. Ridiculous.
If there’s anyone out there who can sell full on games (no earning coins for lives and in app purchase crap) it’s Nintendo.
Just think about it for a second – Who is Nintendo’s target customer for their back catalog of games? Not the kids who are used to modern games and the “freemium” model. But people who are older, hate the freemium model, and will spend some actual money up front for the game.
I’m almost 40, so $10 doesn’t scare me.
I’d pay $9.95 for quite a few of the old games. Hell, I’d pay what they sold for back in the 80’s when I’d beg my Mom to buy me one, or borrowed one for a weekend from somebody. I’d also figure out a way to AirPlay it over to my TV and have a bluetooth controller (I’m sure that exists, but this would motivate me to do it).
I’m not buying any new Nintendo hardware, Wii, whatever. Not gonna happen. Buy if they want to get upwards of $100 from me, in software sales no less, iOS is the only way.
You’d pay 1980s game prices to play old Nintendo games on a tablet with crap controls but balk at simply buying a piece of Nintendo hardware that would enable you to buy those games on the cheap and have proper controls?
I’m not sure I follow the logic.
I completely disagree. My two younger kids (boy, 15, girl, 12) wanted a Wii U last year for Christmas because they were very excited for the new Mario games coming out. They absolutely love playing both the new and old Nintendo games, especially anything like Super Smash Bros., Mario Cart, etc. So do their friends, and most of them have iPhones too. If they could buy Super Smash Bros. for $10 and play their friends via GameCenter or WiFi, they’d pull weeds from the yard, scrub toilets, even brush the dog’s teeth daily to get the money to buy that game!
Nintendo: Nightmare memories of wasting my life playing their repetitive crap. I wear a mushroom medallion around my neck to keep the crap from biting me again. I never have understood the appeal. Give me a rollicking good 3D adventure game any day!
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