Nintendo gaming for iOS could work with a custom controller
In an earlier post today, I suggest Nintendo could be another Sega fairly soon, offering its IP on the App Store. Tap! deputy editor Matthew Bolton (who knows more than a bit about gaming), countered on Twitter:
I’m not so sure about Mario on [the] App Store. Nintendo’s technical meticulousness in Mario is unparalleled outside of racers… the controls’ responsiveness is tuned to perfection, and touchscreens are laggy. It’s an Apple situation
I agree. Touchscreens are fantastic for certain types of gaming, but not Mario-style platformers. (That’s not to say there aren’t decent 2D platformers for iOS, but they certainly don’t match Super Mario in terms of, as Matt put it, ‘technical meticulousness’.) But there is a solution: a third-party controller.
It’s not like such a thing is without precedent: I’ve written about iOS games controllers before, and although they’re something of a niche, Nintendo has the hardware savvy to produce such a thing, and the IP clout to encourage plenty of people to buy it. Of course, the company would lose control elsewhere, notably in terms of device hardware. But if Nintendo’s forced into a Sega-like position, its games on the App Store and a Nintendo controller doesn’t seem like the worst alternative.
New Super Mario Bros iOS could work as an infinite runner, tapping to make Mario jump and chaining jumps to find hidden bonuses. But an add-on would be dangerous territory for Nintendo – witness the debacle over the Circle Pad Pro for 3DS.
An endless runner could work well enough—the iOS Rayman runner’s quite good—but it would be a very different title. Perhaps Nintendo could rework its IP for new platforms, but I wonder whether, given its history, if it’d be more like Sega and just churn. On an add-on, I’m thinking of something like the iCade handheld controllers, which aren’t essential but for certain types of game can improve handling.
I’m not sure why people assume that Nintendo can either go bankrupt, or go iOS. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that, should the Wii U and 3DS fail to meet its predecessors’ numbers, Nintendo will just shrink back to its Gamecube-era size, continue to make new hardware every few years, sell 20-30 million of each new device, and sell their own first-party titles for this hardware, all at a tidy profit.
To me, this seems like a more likely scenario than them abandoning hardware altogether, and I don’t think most people would dispute that there’s a 20-million-every-few-years market for a device that plays Nintendo’s games.
I don’t think Nintendo sees itself primarily as a console manufacturer that competes with Sony and Microsoft. I also don’t think tehy see themselves as a hardware manufacturer that competes with Apple. I think they see themselves as a toy manufacturer like Lego or Mattel that just happens to make toys that play games.