A key shareholder at Nintendo has written to company president Satoru Iwata asking him to consider in-app purchases for future first-party Nintendo games...
“Just think of paying 99 cents just to get Mario to jump a little higher,” hedge fund manager Seth Fischer said in a letter to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Trust us, Seth, we’ve thought about it long and hard. It made us shudder a little.
Hear that, guys? It doesn’t matter that we’ve been managing to navigate generations of Super Mario Bros with a perfectly regular, unenhanced jumps. We now get to make a fun and challenging game MINDLESS and EASY for the bargain price of $0.99.
“We believe Nintendo can create very profitable games based on in-game revenue models with the right development team,” Fischer went on. “The same people who spent hours playing Super Mario, Donkey Kong, and Legend of Zelda as children are now a demographic whose engagement on the smartphone is valued by the market at well over $100 billion.”
Nintendo is a great company that have done a hell of a lot for the progression of game development over the years, and it’s sad to see it struggling with console sales for the last 18 months or so. Suggestions like this will do little to curb claims of mismanagement and botched marketing at Nintendo, and no doubt is indicative of wider shareholder fears about Nintendo’s financials.
But however tempting it might be to submit to the easy cash flow that comes with in-app purchasing, plenty of games that have come before have illustrated gamers’ dislike and mistrust of microtransactions, and this can only damage a company’s credibility in the long run. Nintendo have so far stayed out of the mobile sphere when it comes to gaming, but we imagine there are few gamers who would choose purchase-ridden 3DS games over Nintendo expanding to mobile markets...
What do you think of Fischer's suggestion? How do you think Nintendo should move forward?
Let me know what you think!
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