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Opinion: Don’t hold your breath for real Nintendo games on your iPhone or iPad

My feelings for Nintendo are complicated. I’ve loved its games ever since the original Donkey Kong, owned every Nintendo console (including the Virtual Boy), and recommended the Wii U as the best game console for families and kids. But if I was mildly displeased with Nintendo as a company during its haughtiest years — the time when most of its key third-party developers walked away — I’m downright angry with it today. At a press conference in Japan this morning, Nintendo announced its second collaboration with a mobile game publisher in two months, the headline from which was what millions of people have been waiting years to read:

“Nintendo to start making iPhone games, including first-party IP like Mario.”

Sure, the official Nintendo press release actually says “smart devices” including phones and tablets, but iPhones and iPads are a safe bet. The press release also says “gaming applications” rather than games, but a press release from Nintendo’s new mobile partner DeNA confirms that the companies will indeed produce mobile games together. Just think about it: Super Mario World on the iPad! Donkey Kong Country on the iPhone! That’s just what everyone has wanted! But there’s a catch…

Unfortunately, because this is Nintendo we’re talking about, the reality is more complicated than the headline:

“We have no intention at all to port existing game titles for dedicated game platforms to smart devices,” said Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, “because if we cannot provide our consumers with the best possible play experiences, it would just ruin the value of Nintendo’s IP.”

DeNA confirmed this:

“To ensure the quality of game experience that consumers expect from this alliance of Nintendo and DeNA, only new original games optimized for smart device functionality will be created,” DeNA said, “rather than porting games created specifically for the Wii U home console or the Nintendo 3DS portable system.”

I know what you might be thinking. “New, original games from Nintendo for iPhones? That means a new Legend of Zelda for iPad. Sign me up!” But that’s not what’s happening here. These will be DeNA games using Nintendo characters. That’s like Microsoft giving Hasbro the rights to make a Minecraft board game. And Nintendo’s still not interested in bringing its backcatalog to hundreds of millions of App Store customers.

So why am I angry? Because there’s no good reason for Nintendo to hold its titles back from the App Store any more. iOS devices are powerful enough in every way to run 90% of Nintendo’s past games. And there’s no business justification, either. Nintendo’s first mobile game partner, GungHo, has made over $1 billion on a single mobile game.

Back in January, Nintendo announced a partnership with GungHo — a company best known for free-to-play puzzle games and regionally popular RPGs — to release a Super Mario Bros. version of GungHo’s mobile game Puzzle & Dragons (shown above). As a sign of how messed up the video game industry has become, the simple matching Puzzle & Dragons game accounted for over 90% of GungHo’s $1.5 billion in 2014 revenue. GungHo actually surpassed Nintendo’s market capitalization two years ago, despite Nintendo’s ownership of two current-gen gaming platforms and the world’s most valuable library of classic games. How? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that GungHo’s embrace of iOS and Android gaming (like King Digital Entertainment’s Candy Crush-fueled $2.2-billion 2014) is responsible for this insane cashflow.

Despite Nintendo’s insistence that it would “ruin the value of Nintendo’s IP” to offer compromised game experiences on “smart devices,” the reality is that there are now fewer compromises on iOS than on Nintendo’s own platforms. Buying games from Nintendo’s eShop (above) is a multi-step chore compared with two-tap App Store purchases, and games bought for one Nintendo device won’t run on others. Apple has made the purchasing experience comparatively frictionless.

As crazy as this sounds, you have a better chance of easily controlling a 7-year-old iOS game on any current-generation iOS device than a 7-year-old Nintendo game on the Wii U. Try to play a Wii game on a newer Wii U and you’ll have to deal with screens like the one above, showing you which of Nintendo’s giant collection of controllers will and won’t work with the title. I recently downloaded several original Wii titles for my Wii U, only to discover that I had to go out and buy $40 worth of additional controllers to play them. (And I already owned two different types of Wii U controllers. Nintendo didn’t bother to update the Wii U eShop versions to support Wii U controllers.)

It goes without saying that iOS devices already have more than enough horsepower to run Nintendo’s most beloved games. Floppy Cloud, an NES and SNES emulator that briefly appeared in the App Store, runs pretty much every 8- and 16-bit Nintendo game ever made at full speed, including the original music and fully responsive controls. Nintendo could buy the emulator for a pittance, sell NES and SNES games for $3 each, and probably make more money in one week than the Wii U console made last year.

You’re not just limited to on-screen controls any more, either. If you don’t like the virtual D-pad and buttons, you can use a Bluetooth controller such as Mad Catz’ Micro C.T.R.L.i (reviewed here), which iOS has officially supported since iOS 7. Earlier Bluetooth controllers were unofficially supported before that.

Nintendo could sell iOS gamers Bluetooth versions of its classic controllers for $30-$40 each, and people would be happy to buy them. But most games play quite well with the emulator’s virtual controls, and would be even better if the buttons could be resized and moved to your choice of locations.

If you’re willing to jailbreak your device, which I don’t personally advise, other iOS emulators already support more powerful consoles such as the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo DS. Again, it would take Nintendo (or DeNA) very little effort to buy one of these emulators outright, assuming they don’t have the iOS coding prowess to make an emulator themselves.

And given the incredible results the developers of the Mac/Windows Dolphin Emulator (above) have achieved with the GameCube and Wii — 83% of games are playable, looking better on computers than they did on the original Nintendo consoles — it’s not too hard to imagine even sophisticated 3-D games running perfectly under emulation on the latest iPads. Take a look at the two pictures below. Can you tell the difference between Nintendo’s last F-Zero racing game and the $4 iOS-exclusive AG Drive, released last month? Hint: the one actually running at Retina resolutions (rather than 480p) is the iOS game.

I love Nintendo’s games, but in my view, the company is doing everyone — its fans, and itself through its shareholders — a huge disservice by continuing to hold back its backcatalog from phones and tablets. Promising “new original games” developed by so-so developers like GungHo and DeNA really isn’t enough. The world doesn’t need another free-to-play puzzle game with Mario or Zelda characters. It needs to experience the truly great Nintendo games that people have loved for decades.

It’s time for Nintendo to actually take the big step that its fans have been waiting for, and bring its best games directly to the iPhone and iPad. With iOS’s giant user base, powerful hardware and controller support, no excuse makes sense any more. But after so many years of waiting, I’m not holding my breath at this point. Are you?

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Comments

  1. Mark Carabin - 9 years ago

    I brought up this argument in the last episode of my podcast, The Warp Whistle (find it on iTunes). We had pretty perfect timing since we recorded the episode on Sunday right before all of this started coming out. I argued that Nintendo could partner with Apple, but any mobile app dev would do really, as they’ve chosen to run with DeNA. I brought up the Nintendo-made mobile controller idea too. I think you’re spot on with this, and while I wouldn’t wish touch control Super Mario Bros on my worst enemy, being able to play it with a controller on my retina screen iPhone would be amazing.

    • Mel Gross - 9 years ago

      Nintendo has been losing money hand over fist. And what do they ascribe that to? Apple. They have listed Apple as their biggest competitor for years now.

      As a family oriented company, Nintendo would fit in Apple very well. Apple CPU,d buy enough stock to get effective control, if they wanted to, but Apple doesn’t do this.

  2. Apple should just buy Nintendo and make the big games a feature of the next version of Apple TV.

    • nullifiedone - 9 years ago

      Nintendo would never sell tho, you gotta remember, nintendo is in no shortage of money by any means.

      • J.latham - 9 years ago

        Not true. They are actually moving through their stockpile of cash from the Wii days. Wii U and 3DS aren’t selling near the same numbers as their previous generation.
        As far as the fact that Nintendo would have to agree to the sale, all that I would imagine that would be needed for that is a good talk on anti-fragmentation of their games over a large market place and a good sense of creative flexibility with future games.

      • @J.latham

        Not true? Are you serious? They could lose over a quarter of a BILLION dollars a year and still be above water into the early 2050’s. I’ll probably be dead by then. You have no clue what you are talking about, Nintendo, while not breaking sales records, is bigger than Sony and is doing just fine. Learn something before opening your mouth and calling Nintendo a dying company. People have been saying that for a DECADE and they are still doing just fine.

    • drhalftone - 9 years ago

      More likely scenario is Apple simply forms its own Games team and creates a series of Nintendo-like characters like Sega did with Sonic as a match to Mario.

  3. joelwrose (@joelwrose) - 9 years ago

    I’ve always thought they could use this to sell more hardware. The should (finally) allow you to buy a classic game once and use on any Nintendo device (Wii U, 3DS) and then expand that concept so you could buy a game on an iPhone, and then that purchase carries over to Nintendo devices.

    This would allow them to make money off of selling games to more people, but also entice them to buy a nintendo system to carry over their purchases and to play the games like they’re intended to, with Nintendo controllers. It could be a win-win scenario.

  4. friarnurgle - 9 years ago

    Think there is room for Nintendo to profit in both markets. Many kids have Nintendo handhelds and consoles but many move away from Nintendo as they age. Entering the mobile phone market will get these users back. It could potentially increase sales of Nintendo consoles as many people will be want to play those big name exclusives after playing the retro games or whatever Nintendo comes up with for iOS/Android.

  5. aaronblackblog - 9 years ago

    I fully agree. But–solely to play devil’s advocate–weren’t people saying similar things to Apple back in the late 90s? Apple has always held it’s software and hardware closely in its own grasp and only with rare exception (like iTunes) worked to develop for other platforms. In the late 90s when MS was having huge success by running on absolutely anything that would take it and developing for everything, people called for Apple to give up their tight grasp on their software matched to hardware model. In the end, it all seems to have worked out well for Apple.

    • Jeremy Horwitz - 9 years ago

      Apple had a talent for designing hardware and, with Jobs back at the helm, a deep ambition to keep doing so. Nintendo has always been excellent at game software, but hardware and more recently OS’es have shown that it’s way behind the times, and out of touch with what third-parties want to support. IMO, Nintendo keeps making consoles so it can collect licensing fees. Reasonable people may disagree.

      • drhalftone - 9 years ago

        The Nintendo Wii was a huge hit that third party developers loved because of how easy a platform it was to write code for and having a unique controller, and the Game Cube was profitable and more then held its own against the PS 2 and the original Xbox in graphics and performance (Resident Evil 4). They clearly took a big chance in the Wii U and it didn’t pay off. That’s a far cry from being way behind the times.

  6. kjl3000 - 9 years ago

    Nintendo should release rewritten titles of old console classics like Super Mario Bros (NES) to iOS and android, like sega did it with sonic 1, 2, CD and spinball (with a nice 16:9 aspect ratio bump)… These titles are already on sale as virtual ware for wii / wii u, and are definitely not canibalizing hardware sales …

  7. Inaba-kun (@Inaba_kun) - 9 years ago

    I can’t say I agree with this. The Wii U may be dead in the water, but the 3DS is doing fine and Nintendo have a gigantic pile of cash. They don’t need to port their games to smart phones.

    Virtual D-Pads are horrible and would ruin classic Nintendo games, which rely on very precise controls. The best you could expect then, would be original titles designed for touch screens, maybe a new Paper Mario or Fire Emblem. They could work on a technical level, but on a financial level? Not a chance. Nintendo don’t make budget games, and their games rarely drop in value. Why would they want to get caught up in the race to the bottom which has left phones and tablets with the anti-gaming disaster that is free to play?

    • Jeremy Horwitz - 9 years ago

      Even at current prices, I’d be willing to wager Nintendo could sell more copies of their classics in the App Store than they do in the eShop. Even if they required a special Bluetooth Nintendo controller accessory to play on iOS.

      • drhalftone - 9 years ago

        I think you ignore Nintendo’s fear of software pirating. If they release games on other platforms, they lose their control of the content. One could conceive of users jailbreaking iPhones and overriding any DRM code. That’s not to say that 3DS games can’t be pirated, but at least its in Nintendo’s control to update the firmware of their devices.

    • You’re complete right about the virtual controls. That would be an instant death knell for any releases of old titles. Without a controller to play them with I would never even bother buying them. You can’t play those games with a touch interface. There’s a reason those kinds of games are incredibly simple, hilariously easy, or rife with predatory in-app purchases to get you past the hard parts. Putting virtual controls on those games would make them instantly undesirable for anyone that’s ever played the originals. Not releasing them that way is the only option, people saying they should just port them have no idea what they are talking about.

  8. hijaszu - 9 years ago

    They are just lazy to port the code, so this IP thing is just an excuse. And also saying that these will be new Nintendo games is just ridiculous. Probably nothing will be involved from Nintendo’s side, so if they are making the press release it gives the hint that they are in trouble and in huge need of some press appearance.

    • Porting them to a touch screen interface would be incredibly stupid. You cannot play those games properly with a terrible interface that is touch. They wouldn’t work, calling them lazy is just ignorant.

  9. Dan Eaton - 9 years ago

    If Nintendo ported their back catalogue of retro games onto smart devices they would make an absolute mint. I’d pay £3 a game and buy a dedicated controller. It’d cost them very little. It makes no sense whatsoever that they haven’t done this so far and are refusing to do it at all.

  10. confluxnz - 9 years ago

    I think Nintendo are actually making the right decision not porting their games to iOS. Virtual D-pads and buttons look and operate like absolute crap, and I’m sure the vast majority of users won’t want to shell out for a dedicated gamepad for their iPhone.

    Even more than this, I simply think Nintendo are less than thrilled at the idea of releasing games in to a market cornered by Apple where one has to pay the other a 30% cut. Flag. Especially when Nintendo don’t even need the money.

  11. gsetim - 9 years ago

    I agree 100% with you.

  12. gsetim - 9 years ago

    Of course, the way things are going, Apple will probably buy Nintendo in two years for pennies on the dollar, and all will be right in the world. Well, if you are an iOS user.

  13. patrickres9 - 9 years ago

    Am I the only one who doesn’t game on tablets and smart phones? I don’t even own anything in either category. I do own a gaming PC and a Wii-U. I would like to NOT be isolated away from Nintendo, with them switching gears to mobile. I hate mobile as a medium. Touch controls are aweful, and I don’t want to drag around and sync a bluetooth controller. I want something dedicated and always plugged into a tv or monitor, that doesn’t have me hunched over a tiny screen. I understand projecting my mobile devices image onto a TV. I’m not interested in that, either.

  14. J Stark (@jrstark3) - 9 years ago

    I want DK Jr on the iPad! Is this a pipe dream?

  15. daymondkay - 8 years ago

    Still wondering why Nintendo isn’t making move into mobile gaming with their Super Mario and Pokemon games. I still can’t imagine these emulators http://www.cydiageeks.com/best-ds-emulator-iphone-nds4ios-vs-inds.html take away their customers.