Quantity muscles over quality for the likes of Apple and Google, Nintendo president claims
For a man who hadn’t once used the word iPhone in his hour-long GDC lecture, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata still managed to publicly tear into the Apple smartphone empire.
“Rather than offer you a rosy picture of our industry, I would like to discuss three concerns,” he said at the concluding stages of his keynote speech.
Iwata glided through his first and second concern, but the final one he embellished on with the kind of provocative language that, at times, seemed extraordinary for a leading Japanese businessman.
“Game development is drowning,” he declared.
The Nintendo boss recalled that in his 2005 GDC keynote, the audience were developers of many systems, but not commonly mobile devices.
Advertisement
“But today, it may be the majority of you developers who are making mobile games,” he said.
“It gives me concern.”
And, just a stone’s throw from the venue of Apple’s iPad 2 press conference, Iwata exposed his long-harboured dislike of the mobile gaming market unequivocally.
“These platforms have no motivation to maintain the value of the gaming,” he said.
“Quantity is how they profit. The value of software does not matter to them.”
By “them”, he wasn’t simply referring to Apple. Google and Facebook were too the target of his attack.
Speaking to the packed crowd of industry professionals, he claimed that the business of game design is more perilous than ever.
“With so many consoles to publish games on, it is already so hard to attain visibility and status,” he said, before explaining that mobile market is only making life harder.
Citing Forbes data, Iwata claimed that 92 per cent of mobile app downloads are for free content. He said that, in the oceanic smartphone games market, the chance to be visible – and the opportunity to make a living – is remarkably low.
It’s a very confusing time for people. There’s not much stability, he said.
“It confirms for us that our world is changing.”
But Nintendo insists that one defining value remains – “Content is king.”
Quality of product is still distinguishes success from failure, he said.
“But will that still be the case moving forward?” he asked. “Is maintaining high-quality games a top priority, or not?”
Iwata said the only constant in a shifting games industry should be the primary need for quality content.
“Without content, there is no industry,” he said.
This was, make no mistake, Iwata’s declaration that the firm will not join the smartphone race or the $0.99 business. It will not spend three months building a game and then add to it thereafter.
“We really want consumers to appreciate the premium value of content,” he said. “What we make is valuable, and we should protect that value.”
---
For the latest GDC news iPhone owners should download our free app (iTunes link). It puts Develop’s daily must-read online news content – including all the stories from GDC – in the palm of your hand. Sponsored by Blitz Games.
What Iwata is missing here could be, I fear, catastrophic for Nintendo as a hardware company. The issue here isn't Apple - it wasn't Apple who set the prices of software on iPhone... It was the developers. The honest truth of the matter is that Apple created hardware superior to Nintendo's and offered it as an open platform that anyone could publish on... Developers took that hardware and created games which were better than almost all output on Nintendo's DS - and up to 80x cheaper.
Nintendo simply can't compete with that.
And that makes Iwata sad...
End of story.
Guess we'll play one of the 1,500+ games for Nintendo DS, of which 90% have a metascore of under 20 or are not rated.
Seriously, Nintendo, get your third party support up and stop giving licenses to companies that are yet to prove themselves.
I'm fondly reminded of when Hiroshi Yamauchi called Microsoft a young upstart going head-to-head against a yokozuna (think small sumo going up against very big, fierce sumo). I like Nintendo execs making controversial comments at annual events!
Nintendo aren't in trouble because the first-party products they make are so very good, but their flagship brands suffer from being targeted at the least-discerning markets - families and young kids. It will be easier for Bethesda, Rockstar and Activision-Blizzard to compel devotee consumers to keep buying £50 titles in a market where there will be more excellent cheap, quick-to-learn and short-play-session games around for the massive non-core gamer audience.
Perhaps Nintendo should connect back with core gamers again, in a way that respects the variety of their audiences? Create an Animal Crossing game that users can interact with for free via portals besides Nintendo hardware, maybe?
No, what's amazing is that Japanese execs when public speaking, to dress down-casual, still sport an Armani suit with black or grey shirt open neck shirt.
As much as I love the way Apple have created "the world's best software ecosystem", Iwata does have a point.
The iOS App store seems to have accelerated the games industry into a stage of maturity.
So it is no wonder why Iwata wants to create a differentiation, so the 3DS' launch coinciding with the iPad 2's release might be the perfect time for this differentiation to occur.
But in order for this differentiation to be effective, Nintendo may have to rethink what the DSiWare store landscape should look like and be putting in a great effort to steering DSiWare developers towards achieving this goal.
Nintendo only care about Nintendo. They don't care about the video games market generally unless that market can damage their 1st party sales....and that's what seems to be happening. Any comments by Mr Iwata about the damage to the value of videogame software are only from the Nintendo point of view.
Nintendo has always seen 3rd party developers (for their consoles) as the enemy.
I'm not surprised that developers are moving to console platforms that actually WANT and encourage them to develop games for them (and maybe they can avoid all that tedious mucking about with publishers at the same time).
