Nintendo Wants to Siphon Smartphone Games

On the heels of my forwarding the idea that Nintendo should be making their own phones in this piece about Nintendo, The Japan Times reports that Big N is doing the opposite:

Nintendo Co. is trying to modify its game consoles so customers can use smartphone applications on them as it searches for a way to return to profitability, company sources said.

The game console and software maker has offered professional-use conversion software to application developers so they can produce smartphone games that can be played on Wii U, a struggling home video game console that helped widen the firm’s operating loss in fiscal 2012.

The way this reads implies that they are trying to create iOS and Android middleware that will make it easy for those developers to port existing games to Wii U. That doesn't change the fact that people will be more likely to carry those games around on their non-Nintendo smartphones.

Nintendo hopes smartphone software will help spur console sales, which will in turn lead to an increase in popular game titles for them, the sources said.

They will have to massively simplify their interface, and make the long-needed move of unifying the Virtual Console for both the Wii U and the 3DS, with Apple-like redownloading. The biggest problem facing Nintendo is that, like Toho Co., they are a 100-year-old company run by 100-year-old men. They will look at backward solutions like this instead of proper overhaul tactics. Even when things are broken, the solutions do not go far enough to properly correct their course. They still view themselves internally as a Japanese company that happens to have a "foreign" audience, instead of a global company based in Japan.

Nintendo will also focus on developing new software on its own, the sources said.

The entire contents of the story read like a controlled leak designed to shape this story as "Nintendo on the upswing". The software they should be focusing on is their own Android fork ("NintendOS"?) to go with their own phone hardware.

First Takes on OUYA

The Verge's David Pierce rips it apart (in one case literally):

For $99, everyone who backed Ouya's Kickstarter has unwittingly signed up to beta-test a game console. Alpha-test, even: this is a product with some good ideas and a potentially promising future, but it's a million miles away from something worth spending your money on. Even if the concept is right, the Ouya misses the mark. The controller needs work, the interface is a mess, and have I mentioned there's really nothing to do with the thing? I'm not even sure the concept is right, either: there are plenty of fun Android games, but currently few that work well with a controller and even fewer that look good on your television.

The PA Report's Ben Kuchera offers what I consider a more considered assessment, angles as a response to the Verge piece:

I have an OUYA dev kit at home, and I’ve been playing with it for the past few days. The whole thing kind of sucks right now, but that’s okay.

This soft launch is very much a beta test, and my conversations with OUYA CEO Julie Uhrman were peppered with things that were going to be added later, or that will improve, or that the team is looking at. Right now the interface is laggy, and there aren’t that many games to play. Not all the features are there, and many that do exist work in their most basic forms.

Keep the system away from your kids, because buying content is incredibly easy. The system works well, but it’s far from finished; the firmware and the feature set, not to mention game and app selection, will hopefully improve quickly once thousands of fans, developers, and enthusiasts begin to descend upon the hardware and the ODK. What the OUYA team does is important, but their job has always been merely to deliver the skeleton of the system. I want to see what developers and modders begin to do once the hardware is out in the wild.

The point about buying content being way too easy is shared by both writers, and if I were OUYA, that'd be the first thing I would fix. I urge you to read both articles. I'm eager to see Polygon weigh in too.

The OUYA plus the "Steam Box"-like PC/micro-consoles that X3i are manufacturing make for a more disruptive new category than I think Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are expecting.