Thursday, November 7, 2013
Nintendo Sells Nintendoes
Three months ago a Nintendo CEO explained to investors why a Mario game would not be sold on the iPhone. I love this story because it demonstrates how shareholders do not always have the company's best interests in mind. An antsy investor can flip his stock at any time, but owners and employees are in it for the long haul. In this case, investors want Nintendo to sell their games on their competitor Apple's hardware. Although there is a market demand for what the investors want, Nintendo's console-based business model would suffer in the long run. Nintendo sells Nintendo games, which cease to be Nintendo games if they're not sold for Nintendoes.
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Companies need to redefine themselves too, though. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to make games available on other devices. After all, you can already play versions of old Nintendo games from the web.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting point. But people have already created emulators of many different platforms to play those games. They are just losing money in the long run on conforming with society.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean? Nintendo already has a successful digital distribution service, both for their back catalog and modern games.
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