Nintendo's Mobile Push to Focus on Marketing Demos, Not Full Games
Earlier this month, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata indicated Nintendo was looking into a new business structure involving "smart devices" after the company experienced its third consecutive annual loss in light of increasing competition from mobile platforms.
While that statement was interpreted by some as an indication of Nintendo's plan to develop game titles for iOS and Android, it appears that the company instead intends to use smartphones to market its existing handheld and console hardware and game lineup.
According to a report from Japanese business newspaper Nikkei [Google Translation] (via Dr. Serkan Toto), Nintendo will introduce a free app that includes information on new games, including videos and character profiles along with some smartphone mini games.
But Nintendo will not simply put Mario, Pokemon or other games on smartphones. According to the report, Nintendo plans to use Android and/or iOS devices (not confirmed at this point) to market its console games.
To be more concrete, The Nikkei writes that Nintendo wants to use smartphones to expand its potential user base by spreading information about new game releases, i.e. by using video to introduce future titles. (This will probably happen through some kind of official Nintendo app.)
Nintendo's mini games are said to be playable demos of console games, but full versions of the titles will only be available on Nintendo hardware like the Wii U and the 3DS. The idea is to give players a small taste of the gameplay in order to entice them to purchase content on the Nintendo platform.
Mobile devices from Apple and Android and more popular consoles from Microsoft and Sony have devastated Nintendo's earnings in recent years. According to a report from App Annie, consumer spending on games for iOS and Android is now 4x that of dedicated gaming handhelds and sales of the Xbox and PlayStation have far outpaced Wii U sales. Though Iwata has said that Apple is "the enemy of the future" he has stated publicly that he will not provide Nintendo's "precious resources" to other platforms.
Nintendo is expected to make an announcement about its new mobile app on Thursday.
Popular Stories
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Top Rated Comments
That is an amazingly ignorant idea. Why the hell would I install a Nintendo app to watch a video of a game that won't play on my platform? Idiots.
They will be teetering on the brink in 12-24 months and then Apple can buy them cheap.
Heck, why wait Apple - I want you to buy Mario and Yoshi now, port games to the Apple platform and leverage Wii titles and technology into a new Apple Wii TV that works with my iPhone and iPad as controllers. All that IP could be bought cheaply. Yes their market cap is just shy of $19 Bil right now but it won't be up there in a year or two. Just wait till they half again the sales numbers for Wii U.
You realize that the 3ds sold better than any console last year right? It sold 13.5 million units. It now has an installed base of over 40 million. Failure? It's literally slightly behind its predecessor in sales. Oh and its predecessor was the best selling console of all time.
And they aren't trying to sell the Wii, which was another huge success. They're trying to sell the Wii U, which has performed poorly. So they have one poorly performing console in like 10 years, and they should just quit. Seems legit.