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If I were an investor, and Nintendo's CEO came by and told me they wanted to make games for smartphones or, god forbid, sell to Apple, I'd sell so fast, and with so much energy, CERN physicists would confirm the Higgs boson from my clicking. I think I already posted here about this, some eons ago. To recap: this strategy is bad. It's let's take Nintendo from a powerful stance as both platform maker and virtuoso first party developer, to Oversized Third Party Developer in a market notorious for: (a) Low quality and extremely low fidelity demand, which prizes being cheap and having a gimmick over everything. (b) Notoriously capricious primma donnas such as Apple and Samsung as platform makers, which take insane cuts from developers. (c) Being an extremely fragmented market, with thousands of devices with very different characteristics and software which Nintendo would have to support. Selling Nintendo to Apple is the business equivalent of folding a royal flush. Yeah, so the iPad sold 100 million units. The DS sold 154 million. For a single purpose device. The 3DS might be 20% behind its predecessor's curve -- a ridiculously successful curve, if I might say -- but that's still a cold 124 million units. The Wii was a fad, true... and it redefined the meaning of fad itself, selling 100 million units; a one model, single-purpose device. When factored into this that Nintendo profits from third party software -- unlike Rovio, which has to pay its dutiful tides to petulant lovers by excellance Apple and Samsung -- one starts clearly seeing how Nintendo is pulling ass like Brad Pitt at a wet t-shirt contest. Absolutely insane. Not even Steve Jobs could dream of selling a gadget so well as the 3DS does. Not to mention that, again, in this business if you're a third party developer, either your name is Activision, or you're into masochism. Lose power, lose the platform, and you lose everything that makes you strong. Edit: and I don't even like the Wii U. |