BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

What Nintendo's Mobile Mario Announcement Means For The Video Game Industry

Following
This article is more than 9 years old.

The latest news out of Nintendo is pretty earth-shattering as far as these things go.

The video game giant is partnering with DeNA, a Japanese mobile gaming company, to bring its iconic IP to "smart devices."

DeNA operates the Mobage platform as well as various other online gaming and social media products. Nintendo, of course, is responsible for such iconic game franchises as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.

The companies will purchase 22 billion yen in one anothers' stock as part of the deal. The capital tie-in will give DeNA a 1.2 percent stake in Nintendo, and Nintendo a 10 percent stake in DeNA.

The traditional gaming giant and the mobile gaming firm will also develop a new online membership service to replace Club Nintendo.

"This will allow us to build a bridge between smart devices and gaming consoles," Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told reporters. "It doesn't mean smart devices will eat away at gaming consoles, it will create an entirely new type of demand."

The service will link user accounts across devices, including PC, mobile, 3DS, and Wii U---a first for Nintendo.

According to Nintendo, only new games designed for smart devices will be developed for its new mobile experiment, meaning no classic titles are coming to your iPhone any time soon. This is part of Nintendo's plan to ensure that the high quality of their first-party IP remains intact.

Out of the Blue

Despite the urging of financial analysts over the past few years to go mobile, Nintendo has been reluctant to make the move.

Nintendo had huge hits on its hands with both the DS handheld system and the Wii, two of the best-selling Nintendo consoles in the company's history.

But the 3DS, in spite of its success, has not been as big a hit as its predecessor, largely due to the rise of smartphones. And the Wii U continues to under-perform month after month in spite of Nintendo's increasingly top-notch games on the system.

All of this has made the clamoring for Nintendo to enter the mobile space even louder. Writers from sites like Polygon have urged Nintendo to get on the iPhone bandwagon. An editorial at BGR claimed that Nintendo wasn't dying fast enough to realize it needs to go mobile.

Plenty others have argued that Nintendo should get out of the hardware business altogether, and make its classic IPs available on a suite of devices, ranging from other consoles like the PS4 and XBOX One, to PC and smartphones.

In all these instances, I've argued that Nintendo should not only remain in the hardware business, but also avoid diluting its brand with crappy, exploitative mobile game shenanigans.

For a long time, Nintendo seemed to agree with me---much to the dismay of financial analysts and game writers. But I believed Nintendo could make a comeback if they stayed true to their core mission, and especially if they came out with a better console in the next couple years that outshown its rivals.

This was not meant to be.

Nintendo Flips, Hopefully Doesn't Flop

It's not as though Nintendo has been vague or wishy washy either. They've been adamantly against the idea of a mobile strategy, only saying that they'll use smartphones as a way to advertise their handheld and home console video games.

Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata told an audience at GDC in 2011 that Nintendo makes "platforms designed to demonstrate the high value of high quality video game software. But, there is a second, entirely different way to consider the value of software. The objective of smartphones and social networks, and the reason they were created, are not at all like ours. These platforms have no motivation to maintain the high value of video game software---for them, content is something created by someone else. Their goal is just to gather as much software as possible, because quantity is what makes the money flow---the value of video game software does not matter to them."

Indeed, the mobile gaming space is very nearly the antithesis of traditional video games. Instead of designing a good game and hoping it sells well, mobile and free-to-play games are built around revenue models. Quantity is more important than quality and roping in "whales" is more important than making fun, well-made video games. That's why we have time-gates, in-app purchases, and all sorts of other meddlesome things interfering with our mobile games (except for the good ones.)

It's possible Nintendo and DeNA will avoid this, that the first Nintendo mobile game will basically be Captain Toad on an iPad, with no IAPs and a reasonable price-tag. But I worry.

Iwata has been vocal about Nintendo's unwillingness to enter the mobile space. In 2011 Nikkei reported Iwata stating that a mobile push was "absolutely not under consideration. If we did this, Nintendo would cease to be Nintendo. Having a hardware development team in-house is a major strength. It's the duty of management to make use of those strengths. It's probably the correct decision in the sense that the moment we started to release games on smartphones we'd make profits. However, I believe my responsibility is not to short term profits, but to Nintendo's mid and long term competitive strength." (Translation.)

"Now that smart devices have grown to become the window for so many people to personally connect with society," Iwata said during the DeNA announcement, "it would be a waste not to use these devices."

Welcome to the Danger Zone

Analysts have dreamed of Mario on mobile for a long time now, with some ruminating on the wonders of just "paying 99 cents to get Mario to jump a little higher."

I worry that micro-transactions could destroy the Nintendo brand and its reputation among gamers.

I'm dubious that Nintendo will be able to be everything to everyone. Yes, the company needs a hit with their next video game system---code-named NX at the moment---and yes it's possible that every DeNA-made Nintendo mobile game will be as high-quality as Monument Valley, one of the few mobile games that leaps to mind as the sort of quality we've come to expect from Nintendo.

If every Nintendo mobile game is as good as Monument Valley then I'll eat my hat. There is little reason to believe that DeNA will make only pay-to-play mobile Nintendo games. On Android, piracy rates are so high it would hardly make sense. Free-to-play with IAPs is the only sensible course for Nintendo in mobile, so we're bound to start seeing Nintendo games with various free-to-play revenue schemes muddying the waters.

I find that prospect very depressing, to be quite honest.

And it's not that I don't want Nintendo on my Galaxy Note, either. A game like Captain Toad would be awesome on a touch-screen. I'm thrilled with the idea of playing Star Fox or Metroid or any number of other Nintendo titles on my phone, especially if they're good.

Yet, at the same time, I wonder if Nintendo is taking the easy way, drawn to the conventional wisdom rather than sticking to their guns. What will Nintendo look like in five years? How will their games be known by the masses?

And will that bar that the company sets for quality, polished, bug-free games be lost?

Maybe. Maybe not. I simply find myself less enthusiastic over the DeNA announcement than many.

If it means Nintendo remains solvent and successful then I can't help but support the decision. With millions of smartphones out there, Nintendo stands to make a ton of money in this deal---as does DeNA.

But from a gamer perspective, I worry that this is the first step toward the decline of the Nintendo brand and what it's meant for this industry for the past few decades.

That would be a terrible shame, though far from Nintendo's worst-case scenario.

And as FORBES' Ollie Barder notes, "Nintendo are at their core a toy company, adapting that for a mobile market was never going to realistically work." But partnering with DeNA, and handing over the main development work to another firm under Nintendo supervision, may be a safer and more successful venture.

Time will tell.

Follow me on TwitterCheck out my website