Filip Novotny After years of hesitation, an important decision was made in Kyoto, Japan. Nintendo, one of the leading players in the field of video games, will make a limited entry into the mobile phone and tablet market. DeNA, a prominent Japanese developer of social gaming platforms, will help the company on its way to success in the mobile market.
This name, relatively unknown in the western world, is very prominent within Japan with extensive know-how in online gaming services. According to its boss Satoru Iwata, Nintendo is going to use this knowledge and combine it with its development skills. The result should be a number of new original games from well-known Nintendo worlds, such as Mario, Zelda or Pikmin.
This move leads to the idea that Nintendo has only sold a license to develop simple freemium games that will probably not reach the general quality as a result. However, the head of Nintendo rejected a similar scenario at a press conference in Tokyo. "We wouldn't do anything that could damage the Nintendo brand," Iwata said. He also added that the development of games for smart devices will take place primarily within Nintendo.
At the same time, he assured users and shareholders that entering the mobile market, which in terms of financial model is radically different from the console world, does not mean the end of the current Nintendo. “Now that we've decided how we're going to use smart devices, we've found an even stronger passion and vision for the stand-alone gaming system business,” explained Iwata.
The announcement of cooperation with DeNA, which also includes the mutual acquisition of shares of both companies, was followed by a mention of a new dedicated game console. It has the provisional designation NX and according to Satoru Iwata it will be a completely new concept. He did not share any other details with the public, we should know more information next year.
There is general speculation about greater interconnection of home and portable consoles, and there could even be a complete interconnection of these platforms. Nintendo currently sells the "big" Wii U console and the 3DS family of portable devices.
Nintendo has several times in the past come to the market with a never-before-seen product that managed to change the direction of the entire video game business. At the beginning was the NES home console (1983), which brought a new way of playing and went down in history as an unforgettable icon.
The year 1989 brought another cult hit in the form of the Game Boy portable console. Despite the disadvantages, such as weak hardware or a low-quality display, it managed to devastate all competition and opened the door to the new Nintendo DS console (2004). It brought a "clamshell" design and a pair of displays. This form remains to this day after a number of significant updates.
In the field of home consoles, the Japanese company did less well for a number of years, and products such as the Nintendo 64 (1996) or GameCube (2001) could not reach the former glory of the NES. The growing competition in the form of Sony PlayStation (1994) and Microsoft Xbox (2001) managed to break through only in 2006 with the arrival of the Nintendo Wii. This brought a new movement method of control, which was also adopted by the competition within a few years.
The successor in the form of the Wii U (2012) was unable to build on the success of its predecessor, due to, among other reasons, the fatal bad marketing. Competing consoles today can offer similar functionality to the new Wii U and have incomparably higher performance and a rapidly growing library of games.
Nintendo responded by releasing new games from well-known series - last year it was, for example, Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart 8, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze or Bayonetta 2. However, it is an open secret that if Mario wants to experience at least two more console games generation, its caretakers really need to come up with a radical new concept for the upcoming hardware.
Nintendo is running out of steam. Nothing surprising. They've been out of breath for at least five years. He's probably already stabbing them in the side.. :-)
Instead of making a proper High-end console. As for the DS, I quite liked its concept, but it deserves attention from a technical point of view, such as performance (which is so small that many games can't even be played on Nintendo), displays that have a terrible resolution, terrible colors and touch the touchpads are also not much, the processing of which they could move to the level of 2015 and make the body thinner and lighter, ergonomically adapt the joysticks, make a new stylus that reacts to pressure, etc. which would be interesting for games and rework the rather confused UI. As for new technologies, it would be interesting to use something like Taptic engine or Force touch for joysticks and touch screen. I don't really like the big flats in the form of the 2DS or their gaming tablet and I'm not sure if they can catch up with the big consoles where Microsoft and Sony are miles away in every way... Mobile access is an interesting move anyway.
You're going to beat me to the punch here, but after about four years of trying in vain to use an iPad instead of a games console, I've gone back to the 3DS. Physical buttons and full-fledged (!!) games simply do not replace anything and, paradoxically, because of this I am willing to accept worse graphics, a higher price of the game itself and a lower display resolution. There are about two dozen good games that you can spend a long time playing on iOS, the rest are freemium plagiarisms of famous brands and various simple games that were created as demos at programming competitions in our youth. When the iPad came out, I was looking forward to the fact that the touch screen would allow quality strategy games, but there are only three decent RTS for that (Machines at War 3, Eufloria, Z) out of millions of applications (!!). The rest are a hundred and fifty thousand variations on Clash of Clans and Tower Defender, some of which, like Dungeon Keeper, are literally a crime. As a gaming environment, iOS (and Android) really disappointed me, and dedicated gaming consoles haven't said the last word yet in my opinion:-(