BigJKO

Nintendo announces mobile deal with DeNA

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When? I'm honestly asking, because I don't remember them explicitly making that statement. They probably have, but talking about if they'll *ever* make a game for another platform is a bit different from actually talking about a platform and stating their immediate goals for it, which is to not just port games.

 

I'm not saying they won't *ever* port games to mobile.. But it seems like their current goal is to make new games specifically for smartphones.

 

The "never" statements are indeed a few years old, but as recently as last year they were still insisting they had no plans for developing original games for mobile.  My guess is, once the mobile money starts pouring in, porting old games to smartphones will be too hard to resist.  So when they say they're not doing ports, what they really mean is they're not doing ports this year.

 

http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/17/nintendo-mobile-iwata/

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I honestly hope they DON'T port old games.  Those games were designed well before touch screens and accelerometers were a standard thing and I imagine would play very poorly on a modern cell phone.  Old games need a pretty high degree of precision to be played well, something I imagine wouldn't work in a straight port.  I supposed you could try and update it but the amount of changes I suspect would be required basically means you're just making a new game.

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Yeah, most digital d-pad games on iOS are pretty awful to control, so lets just say I hope Nintendo resists that temptating prospect! :o

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They've explicitly stated they're not doing straight-up ports of existing games.

Yeahhhh, but I just don't believe it, I guess just because of the slew of rereleases with 3D capability released for 3DS.

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Guys, what if this whole thing turns out to be like when they said they would release DS games on Wii U.

 

They make one Japan-only cell phone game and then go back to business as usual.

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This is good news, in my opinion! Grows Nintendo brand awareness amongst the masses, and an additional revenue stream for them.

 

Most of the Nintendo games that I'd most want to play on a phone probably won't happen for quite a while due to being more B or C level franchises, but the games that would make the most sense are their puzzle games. I would play the crap out of Picross, Puzzle League, and Dr. Mario on iPhone.

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Does Nintendo need brand awareness? I was under the impression that everyone and their mum knows what Nintendo is and who Mario is. If you go a little further, most people have played some sort of Nintendo game at some point in their life.

The problem isn't awareness, it's image. They're seen as a console maker for babies by the biggest console audience (boys aged 10-25), which is entirely where their market is focussed. They're ignoring that huge market of gamers who use their phones, and don't care if a game seems kiddy, or have nostalgia but don't want consoles.

The cool thing is, Nintendo aesthetics will transfer super well to a HD device that doesn't have the power to put out realistic graphics. The more I think about this, the more I'm excited. I still have a twinge of nervousness that they'll do it wrong though.

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Yeahhhh, but I just don't believe it, I guess just because of the slew of rereleases with 3D capability released for 3DS.

What the five they did and the sega games?

Also those are cool and I want more of them.

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The first NES game to receive an official iOS port will be Urban Champion, I fucking guarantee it.

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Well should they make some great games for these devices AND charge a fair price ahead of time, like $6 or up, then maybe it will be better for all the developers where over the years their games have been either grossly pirated (on Android) or absolutely devalued (on iOS). That is unless they want to exclusively push the Free to Play shit that everyone else does. Yuck.

 

What the five they did and the sega games?

Also those are cool and I want more of them.

Six, but that's substantial enough to consider a slew to me, especially for something so pointless. For these type of Virtual Console releases that they trickle out and try to make a big deal of instead of just dumping them on the store, I can imagine they wouldn't want to ignore the potential on mobile devices despite them saying otherwise

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That is unless they want to do that Free to Play shit that everyone else does. Yuck.

 

Pokémon Shuffle passed one million downloads in just ten days, before they started forcing it onto your system via Spotpass. Nintendo absolutely wants some of that free-to-play action.

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Six, but that's substantial enough to consider a slew to me, especially for something so pointless.

We have different definitions of slew! The 3DS has been out for how long? At least fifty years!

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We have different definitions of slew! The 3DS has been out for how long? At least fifty years!

Please.

It's been sixty years, obviously.

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Very interesting indeed. I'm perfectly okay with Nintendo ditching the two-screen model of a more traditional single screen thing that can work between multiple platforms to include their home console, handheld console (if those two things are separate at all) and mobile. I don't know about you guys, but I think that Nintendo splitting their efforts between the two consoles has probably resulted in poorer games being made in general. How much of Nintendo's time has been wasted developing the obligatory Mario Party game for 3DS? What if traditional Pokemon was available for every one of Nintendo's platforms and you could cross-save?

 

The more I think about this, the more potential I think it has. Mobile is a bad word for so many people, but I'd prefer to think that it's a sign of Nintendo looking forward instead of staying the course until they bury themselves.

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Does Nintendo need brand awareness? I was under the impression that everyone and their mum knows what Nintendo is and who Mario is. If you go a little further, most people have played some sort of Nintendo game at some point in their life.

 

You'd be surprised how many people have no idea about Mario or Nintendo. For video games, sure, they are the most well known, but they are not as prevalent in public awareness as people within the hobby think. Most people outside the hobby who know Mario or Nintendo only do so because they know someone, most likely a child, who plays those games.

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There's a pretty sizable crowd out there that has a fondness for Nintendo but isn't going to buy every Nintendo console or handheld that comes along. I think a big chunk of the Wii base was like that -- they bought the Wii for Wii Sports or Wii Fit, then bought a whole bunch of Mario games to go with it.

 

A lot of those Wii users moved on to mobile, so it makes a lot of sense for Nintendo to cater to them there.

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You'd be surprised how many people have no idea about Mario or Nintendo. For video games, sure, they are the most well known, but they are not as prevalent in public awareness as people within the hobby think. Most people outside the hobby who know Mario or Nintendo only do so because they know someone, most likely a child, who plays those games.

 

They're kind of irrelevant though. The people who don't know what "a Nintendo" is aren't going to play phone games. At least that's the impression I get. 

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They're kind of irrelevant though. The people who don't know what "a Nintendo" is aren't going to play phone games. At least that's the impression I get. 

 

Eh, not so sure about that.  I've got multiple few family members who would know the names Nintendo and Mario, but not anything else.  And they play stuff like Angry Birds and Candy Crush on their phones. 

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Eh, not so sure about that.  I've got multiple few family members who would know the names Nintendo and Mario, but not anything else.  And they play stuff like Angry Birds and Candy Crush on their phones. 

Ok, I wasn't saying that people know more than that, but they do know what Nintendo is.

I could also come at it from the other side, and say: do people who play phone games only, give a shit about who made them? I don't think those gamers get excited for the next game by King or Zinga they just play whatever is on the top 10 in the App Store. I might be wrong here, but anecdotally that's the case.

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Nintendo is still definitely a recognized brand, but for the current youngest generation of kids growing up right now, it's almost shockingly irrelevant. It seems like it happened almost overnight, but i saw young people in my family and elsewhere kind of all simutaneously migrate from Wii games to iOS games, and the brands there are like... MineCraft, AngryBirds, etc.

I hate playing games on smartphones, i hate the marketplace, i hate the controls, and i hate the design ethos in that space, so i'm not personally happy about seeing Nintendo make this move, but i think this move was probably kind of essential to Nintendo's survival as a company that tries to reach such a broad range of player ages and backgrounds. The way things were going over the last few years, hemorrhaging casual fans and becoming more and more reliant on the core fan group that grew up with their games originally, was not really a long-term survival plan.

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