irixith wrote:Nintendo has a lot of killer IP that others only ever imitate but never duplicate. To roll certain franchises (Animal Crossing was a good example, Pokemon would be another) under the micro-transaction model on tablets/smartphones may very well increase their brand recognition/money in the bank/whatever.
Nintendo doesn't need to increase their brand recognition and this move would actually harm it by watering down their ideals, alienating their existing audience, pushing anti-consumer practises and competing in a market more concerned with games being free than actually being well-designed. The supposed lucrative mobile phone market doesn't care about F-Zero and wouldn't have brought as much money as the 770.000, 50€ copies of Fire Emblem :Awakening that have been sold so far.
A game that does already have successful microtransactions, and expensive ones at that, they are like 6€ a piece and there's a lot of them. Nintendo is already making money with microtransactions and they are expanding their reach in that area, they don't need to move to mobile to profit from them.
But it can be boiled down to this: For all their small titles, they don't gain anything by going mobile. And their big titles are successful enough that they can sell them for 50€ on their propietary console, they would make less money on a mobile platform.
What Nintendo should be doing and IS doing is expanding their merchandaising. Their IP is incredibly popular and the public is hungry for T-shirts, plushes and extremely expensive plastic figurines. They are following the steps of Disney, in which the movies are simply the genesis of a wider product range.
And as I see it, it's a better path to follow than that of Zynga, which is already bankrupt.
At best, I think it makes as much sense to go Mobile as it does for John Deere to stop its production of tractors.