Waiting for a chance to play Super Mario, Zelda and many other popular Nintendo titles on your iDevice? It looks like you'll just have to keep waiting.
While many popular console titles such as Pac-Man and Sonic the Hedgehog have made their way to the iPhone, titles owned by Nintendo have been noticeably absent. Even vintage titles like Donkey Kong have yet to appear in the App Store. The market for games on mobile devices, particularly the iPhone and iPod touch, has been growing exponentially in the past two years. Over that same time, the games market for devices from console manufacturers has been declining steadily.
Nintendo will soon be releasing a new 3-D version of its DS hardware. It is still part of the same six year old platform Nintendo bases its mobile games sales around. Due to the growth of the games market on multi-use devices and the decline of the market on game-only hardware, Nintendo has been feeling pressure from it's shareholders to consider developing for those other devices. According to a news story on website
Electronista.com, Nintendo's CEO and president, Satoru Iwata responded to that pressure in a recent shareholder's meeting.
"Nintendo is defined by integrated hardware and software, others are incompatible with the values Nintendo puts into its hardware. We won't produce software [for them] at all."
While it is hard to understand why Nintendo refuses to develop or license their classic titles for mobile apps, it is understandable that they don't want to do it with their current titles. With the introduction of the DS six years ago, the Nintendo DS became the only mobile device that doesn't present their titles only on a single screen. They still hold that distinction today, and with their next hardware revision, they will be the first to offer their titles in 3-D. Since Nintendo's hardware is unique and ahead of it's competitors in some respects, Nintendo's CEO likely considers modifying games for a single-screen device to be a "dumbing down" of their titles.
What do you think? Should Nintendo develop new titles for iDevices? If not, should they at least release ports of their classic games?
