Nintendo is a company whose name takes you back to the 90s when its portable game pads were the rage. Well, things have changed for the company since its new ventures Wii and Wii U have started failing in the market. The company is now considering moving on to smartphones rather than continue in the faltering gameboy industry.
“Nintendo fell the most in more than 12 years in the U.S. yesterday. The company had previously projected profit of 55 billion yen for the year ending March as it counted on Christmas shoppers to revive sales of the Wii U console featuring games with iconic characters Mario and Zelda. Nintendo cut its forecasts for Wii U console sales to 2.8 million units from 9 million and for Wii U game sales to 19 million units from 38 million.We are thinking about a new business structure, Given the expansion of smart devices, we are naturally studying how smart devices can be used to grow the game-player business. It’s not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone. ” States Nintendo President Satoru Iwata.
It seems that the gameboy industry is suffering not just because of competition from the the likes of Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox, but also from smartphone gaming.
Iwata further states,”The video-game market has moved into smartphones and tablets,Nintendo needs to expand from their current hardware business model. It’s a structural problem.”
It seems that the smartphone industry has finally become the behemoth that can eat up all other industries and therefore, many other device makers have joined the ranks of smartphones and Nintendo seems the latest to bow out.
