Nintendo vs Apple and social gaming
Reggie Fils-Aime of Nintendo thinks that Apple isn’t a viable profit platform for games. The picture for game developers on iPhone certainly isn’t all rosy — the App Store has effectively recreated all the bad elements of retail, without the profit margins.
On the other hand, there are literally 50,000 games and entertainment apps for the iPhone and iPad. Fifty. Thousand. Number for the DS? More like 2500.
And now, Apple’s taking a big big hint from the networked, connected world, and introducing a gaming social network to the iPhone OS.
Basically, achievements, social recommendations, viral mechanics, matchmaking. An Xbox Live for iPhone and iPad. And it sounds to me more like Facebook than Xbox honestly — given that it is paired with the recent release of microtransaction-based in-app purchases, and now also the iAd network, a method for app developers to serve ads.
This isn’t counting other things that are now available to app developers — and tie in perfectly to social gameplay. Stuff like in-app SMS. Access to camera data including real time camera, video, and the photo library. Map overlays. App gifting. Bluetooth keyboards (which opens a whole realm of controller possibilities).
iPad has a lot in common with TVs, consoles, and other closed systems. In fact, it is crazy, ridiculous closed. It also is starting to make ordinary consoles look obsolete, by being more open in very specific, narrow, constraining, chafing, commercially right ways.
This doesn’t necessarily lead to a good future, as Cory Doctorow points out. (The most obvious example of “not-good” being how much it prevents tinkering… consider that the primary software platform for tinkering today in games is Flash, and Apple doesn’t allow it).
But it also isn’t looking to the past.
Radio was once a hobby, did you know that? You made your own. You replaced tubes. You learned call signs. You twiddled knobs. For a while you bought radios that were locked to one station. Later on, you remembered stations via magic code numbers and turned a dial and did this thing called “tuning in.” Heck, we still see that legacy today — I am sure kids wonder why, given that stations are attached to buttons and names now. What’s the frequency number for? Who needs to know about frequencies? Isn’t a frequency an awful lot like a memory register or picture tube or understanding about the little flap that acts as a gas trap in the plumbing under your sink? You don’t give a crap about it. In fact, this whole “station” concept is starting to look silly. What’s a “format” for when you can generate one on the fly on Pandora?
Radio marched past hobby and into appliance. Now it’s a utility, and is piped in everywhere and we have just no idea how it works at all, and don’t care.
Thinking about how games make this turn is… interesting.
5 Responses to “Nintendo vs Apple and social gaming”
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We literally posted about the same topic (almost) inside of a few seconds of one another. My blog entry is a bit less specific to the Apple announcements of today and more specific to one part of many answers to your final question. Nevertheless, we were thinking in the same direction.
Specifically for MMOs, when does a MMO become so connected to your real life that you lose track of where the gameplay starts and ends? Facebook has achieved this with the sheer number of ways the site is accessible. Twitter has done the same. Eventually, some virtual world will be just as integrated into its player’s lives, if not more. Is accepting a raid invite while driving home a valid form of gameplay? How about using Windows Live or SMS to chat with guildies online or extend the length of an auction you had on the auction house? Why can’t I use SMS to send certain commands to the game? The possibilities are fun to contemplate and I think, more fun to solve.
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There are 50,000 games on the iPhone and iPad, but how many of them end up generating any significant revenue for their developers? It’s certainly a viable platform for *Apple* to make money, since they get to skim off the top of everything. And it’s a great distribution channel for getting your games in front of an audience, so for people that are doing it without trying to make it their day job, it’s got a lot of appeal.
But that’s not the same thing as it being a viable future for the games *industry*. And it may be an open question as to whether there *is* a viable future for the games industry, but so it goes.
Yea commercially viable for videogames or commercially viable for apple. They’re two different things.
I feel that Nintendo’s WiiWare and DSiWare fill this gap nicely. The developers I’ve talked too seem happy with it, and the games often times are better for your buck than most brick and mortar releases.
Apple’s platform may be a viable ad-supported platform, but it certainly isn’t going to make a lot money for most game developers. Based on some numbers I saw recently (and need to blog), it looks like the average paid app makes less than $17,000.
Without seeing the numbers, I’d guess that the average DS app makes a good bit more… and is much more likely to be profitable.
In some sense, Apple is competing more with Kongregate and the casual portals than with the DS.
(making their attacks on Flash all the more foolish)
They depend on the hopes and dreams of garage programmers.
Apple, of course, can’t lose. They make money for providing bandwidth and a couple of servers.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if Nintendo was more aggressive about opening up WiiWare and its DS store features for game developers…
… and add a phone peripheral(alas, they abandoned the GB cartridge port).