In a recent announcement, Nintendo has confirmed their partnership with mobile game publisher DeNA to bring Nintendo properties and characters to mobile games and marks the first time that we will see the Nintendo brand on non Nintendo platforms ( with exception to the CDI Philips Zelda disaster.) Nintendo moving into a new market does have fans worried as there are several major pitfalls for them to avoid that are indicative of mobile games today.
Quality Design and Pricing:
Nintendo’s major claim to fame has been their quality of game design which equates to their games keeping their value for a lot longer than other companies. Very rarely do we see Nintendo related price drops and even then the chance of finding a first party Nintendo game for less than $20 is a rare sight.
Nintendo gets away with this as their branding is still strong and thanks to their game designs. However the mobile market in the past has shown that consumers are more interested in quantity than they are quality, with anything more than a dollar raising concerns from the mainstream. Nintendo will have to get used to having their properties be featured in games that are free to play or very cheap and they can’t design them in the same way that they’ve done on the 3DS or other game boy based systems. Square Enix learned this the hard way when they tried to release $15 and up games on the mobile market and it just backfired for them.
To take a popular IP or design and translate it to the Mobile market requires a complete top to bottom shift in mechanics and approach with a great example being Hitman GO. This took the Hitman gameplay and completely changed it for the market in terms of design and pricing structure.
Hitman Go worked because the developers specifically targeted the mobile market in terms of design and pricing and not tried to fit an existing game design to it
Another concern is how Nintendo will handle F2P design that allows them to keep to their standards of design while still providing value for free and paying customers.
I tried their Pokémon Shuffle game and while it was great for the short term, it’s another f2P game that I just don’t see any value in spending money on compared to something like Path of Exile or League of Legends.
Awareness:
This one is an interesting point as Nintendo is one of the most recognizable companies in the world with their characters achieving popularity and notoriety on the levels of Disney and Warner Bros. However despite their reach, Nintendo has never had to deal with the horrors of the app store and how quickly games come and go unless they hit it big quickly.
What’s going to be fascinating to watch is if Nintendo tries to compete against properties like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Game of War and so on who have all become massive money makers and ad campaigns for their respective companies. Nintendo’s main advantage is that unlike the console market, everyone is competing on the same platform. The problem is that Nintendo will be entering a market where the game that you spent months working on, could disappear from the public’s eye within days of going up.
Partnership:
Finally, I have one concern that is very much a Nintendo issue when it comes to the Game Industry. Nintendo is known for a lot of things over the years and one major stigma that has been with them for over 2 decades now is the difficulty of working with them as a third party developer.
In the late 80s-90s, Nintendo was a nasty company with horror stories from developers who had to jump through hoop after hoop to work with them to get their games on their platform. With the explosion of consoles in the late 90s to 00s, Nintendo was forced to back off from this position to woo developers back but the damage was done. During the Wii era, Nintendo also made a name for themselves in a bad way for Indie developers who had a lot of problems with how they handled the Nintendo E-Shop with more developers swearing that they would never work with Nintendo again.
The mobile market is not a new market for Nintendo to enter, but one that has already established big players and games people follow
Nintendo has always been an insular company, with most of their quality content coming from first and second party developers.
This partnership with DeNA, is the second time to my knowledge that Nintendo is teaming up with an outside company for game development and production.
And the first? That was Nintendo working with Sony on a CD platform for the SNES that Nintendo screwed Sony on which led to the creation of the Playstation.
The point is that Nintendo has not been a good partner and I’m really curious to see how this partnership will turn out. Will Nintendo relinquish control of their characters to a developer that specializes in the mobile market or will they try to take the reins, especially depending on how this push to the market goes.
The Mobile Mario Market:
Nintendo’s push into mobile and casual games in my opinion could not come at a worse time. The market has been flooded by developers all trying to compete with the likes of King and the lack of quality and price control has made it difficult for anyone to try and compete with value.
Personally, I would have loved to see Nintendo go after the PC market in terms of ports or simply a virtual console similar to Sega and the dream would be a Nintendo/Valve partnership. However, the chance that partnership would ever happen is up there alongside us discovering magical unicorns.
Nintendo has already proven me wrong with the Amiibo’s popularity but that was them entering a very new market with only a few competitors. The mobile market already has an established fan base, market perceptions and big names and I’m not sure that even Mario is enough to take on Candy Crush Saga or Games of War.
