This is a tricky piece of news.
Nintendo Co. (7974) jumped in Tokyo trading after its new Mario Kart 8 video game surpassed 1 million units in U.S. sales and affiliate The Pokemon Co. said an online trading-card game will be released as an application for Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPad.
The Pokémon game is owned by The Pokémon Company, which is affiliated with Nintendo (Nintendo has certain licensing and marketing rights) but not owned by Nintendo.
“We have been here many times before in regards to Nintendo’s tentative plans to introduce some of its characters for smart devices,” Amir Anvarzadeh, a manager of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. in Singapore, said by e-mail. “This latest Pokemon cards plan which is already out on PCs is hardly a change in its direction.”
This is not quite correct. Since there is currently no Nintendo affiliated game on the iPad, this is a “sticking their toes in the water” moment for Nintendo. Pokémon is a huge property, certainly one of the largest electronic gaming properties in the world. Pokémon on iPad is a big step for The Pokémon Company and for Apple, and I would think the sales numbers will be an important source of sales intel for future Nintendo projects.
The real question is how tightly affiliated are Nintendo and the Pokemon company? Many people feel pokemon is a 100% owned subsidiary.
This is tricky news. The Pokémon Company is not new to iOS – they’ve released several apps on iOS in years past, including an official Pokédex app and a TV app that are on the US store. They’ve done a few small games in Japan as well, but none that have come to North America. As mentioned here the Pokémon trading card game has appeared on non-Nintendo platforms in the past and actually Nintendo has only ever released the TCG as a video game ONCE before on the Game Boy Color in the early 2000s. This is not really a “major” Nintendo game. Pokemon is, but not the trading card version.
Developing iOS games, especially the type that rake in revenue and appear at the top of Apple’s Top Grossing charts, are not the types of games Nintendo has traditionally been interested in making. While many large Japanese game developers chase the F2P carrot, Nintendo has very steadfastly stayed by their standalone boxed-product approach – believing that to deliver as much value as possible to their customer they shouldn’t/won’t go down the path of IAP-laden games that rely on turning their customers into “whales.” This core value has been repeated many times by company president Satoru Iwata (once a game developer himself). They have only just recently ‘dipped their toes’ into downloadable content – paid add-ons to boxed games, something many other console game publishers have been doing for years. And unlike many companies in that space, they’ve not done it for every title they’re releasing.
While this is an interesting new wrinkle, this is no more a signal that Nintendo is looking at a future of iOS games than Apple doing a Windows version of iTunes means iWork for Windows 8 must be right around the corner.
That feeling might be why they are dipping in this way. If it fails then it isn’t a “Nintendo” failure.
Truth is that all this ‘characters’ stuff isn’t the real test. Nintendo releasing an actual game, even an old one like one of the original Super Mario trilogy. That would be a real test. Console game, franchise directly connected to Nintendo in a big way