Tendo City

About a week ago, Nintendo announced a partnership with the Japanese cellphone software company DeNa. DeNa will make the service that apparently will replace Club Nintendo, and Nintendo is going to make... ugh... cellphone games. Naturally Nintendo's stock has gone up because of this, because investors like mobile. I'm not happy because if Nintendo eventually turns into another one of those evil cellphone/browser-game companies that make nothing but exploitative trash designed to suck up your money it would be a horrible tragedy, but hopefully they can balance things so as to make apps that encourage people to buy Nintendo platforms so that they can play real games. I hope it works, there should be a place for games beyond exploitative not-free-to-play garbage.

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/03...t_fight_it

http://time.com/3748920/nintendo-mobile-...d=tcoshare

http://time.com/3747342/nintendo-ceo-sat...YHF6738a5f


Here is what some of the top cellphone games are like:

... I honestly don't quite get why people actually WANT to play "games" like those, much less why they're so successful.

Yeah, I heard the news...

Frankly, this seems like a move meant to placate investors more than anything else. They've been demanding that Nintendo "go mobile" for many years now, and Nintendo's refused to take the bait, until now. This seems like a compromise. Nintendo's own developers can keep making the good games while they just let DeNA make the cash grabs. Yeah, DeNA doesn't have a good track record. The good news is, there's no easier way to know which Nintendo games to avoid than to give ALL of their bad ones an easy to read label, eh?

It should be noted, Nintendo has already started experimenting with "free-to-start" games -- Rusty's "Real Deal" Baseball and that Pokemon puzzle game for 3DS are their first efforts and mobile-style games. I think it's unfortunate that they're making that kind of thing at all, but if it's all on cellphones, yeah, at least it'll be easier to ignore... :p

Rusty's Real Deal is... actually very creative with how it handles it. On principle, I still don't like it, but the mechanics of it were interesting enough that I tilted my head a bit. I mean, you can actually lower the real world price of objects in the game, even down to "free", through in-game social mechanics. That's... just really interesting.