Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata: “Absolutely not” to smartphone games

Whether handheld gaming console companies like Nintendo or Sony want to admit it or not, smartphones and tablets are starting to become new platforms for playing games. Games such as Infinity Blade and Rage are good examples of how smartphone/tablet games can feature rich and complex graphics as well, although in terms of depth of gameplay, handheld consoles still take the cake on that one. With games like Angry Birds selling hundreds of million, it’s not surprising that Nintendo investors were pressuring the company to start creating games for smartphones and tablets.Whatever their reasoning (we’ll never know), Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata said in an interview with Nikkei said: “This is 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.”

While there is without doubt that there are still legions of handheld console fans out there, sales on the Nintendo 3DS have not be favorable, and it even caused Nintendo to start slashing prices drastically in order to “create momentum for the Nintendo 3DS and accelerate its market penetration toward the year-end sales season.” This is a stance that’s probably familiar to Nokia pre-Windows Phone 7, so here’s hoping that Nintendo won’t be heading down that path.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones, Gaming
Tags: 3DS (Nintendo), Apps, Japan, Nintendo, Smartphones, Tablet