By Though games for smartphones enjoy a great popularity, Nintendo sticks to its own hardware refusing to develop games for mobile platforms including Apple’s iOS and Android, as the company announced today. Yasuhiro Minagawa from Nintendo said that the strategy of developing games only for its hardware won’t suffer changes remaining as we know it. Even if Pokemon has started to do this and thus provide games for smartphones, Nintendo sustains that Pokemon is an independent company and its decisions and actions don’t affect Nintendo’s strategies.
The growing popularity of smartphone-based video games has put some pressure on the top portable-hardware company in the game industry if we take into account some figures. Therefore, if in 2009, iOS owned only 19% of the portable game market and Nintendo ruled with 70%, last year iOS and Android reached 34% of this market leaving Nintendo with only 56%. And things tend to get even better for iOS and Android since a recent study shows that the most popular application category on mobile platforms are the games. This study has also concluded that average game players spend almost 8 hours monthly playing video games on their smartphones and those who own an iPhone spend around 15 hours doing the same thing on their devices.
With this background, things don’t seem to look too good for Nintendo. The portable-hardware company has some difficulties in selling its latest device, the 3DS. The device allows users to live the 3D experience without the need of special glasses. What turned users away is the fact that they need an appropriate viewing angle in order to do that. The portable’s price ($250) has also had a heavy word in making users not buy the product. Satoru Iwana, the Nintendo chief has tried to explain that by saying that the “value of 3D images without the need for special glasses is hard to be understood through the existing media” and that “not that many people believe now is the time to buy [the 3DS].’”
In a question-and-answer session with shareholders yesterday, the Nintendo chief said that the company isn’t suffering due to mobile games or those played on Facebook. He said that he “would like you to understand that, so far, consumers have not stopped playing with Nintendo DS because they are using these [mobile] services or playing social games”.